Old friend Elias Isquith has an excellent piece in the Atlantic (!) on Paul Ryan. Elias makes the comparison with Goldwater (which isn’t made nearly enough):
Despite his affable, aw-shucks demeanor, Ryan is the most ideological and potentially divisive nominee to the White House in a half century. Not since Barry Goldwater proclaimed extremism in defense of liberty to be no vice and moderation in pursuit of justice no virtue has a major party candidate so forcefully challenged America’s political status quo.
Isquith then notes, that Ryan is all about making Team Conservative win, not about any particular principles:
This is one of the great ironies of the modern Republican Party: Without the Religious Right that Goldwater so despised, there would be no Reagan Revolution, no Contract with America, and no George W. Bush presidency. No defense buildup in the early 1980s; no tax cuts in 1981, 2002, and 2003. Throughout the past 30-plus years, it’s been the Moral Majority and its fellow travelers knocking on doors, pounding pavement, and writing checks to keep Republicans ascendant in Washington. As the party’s stance on taxes, foreign policy, and domestic spending drifted closer to Goldwater and further from the political center, it was Tony Perkins — not Milton Friedman — making sure the GOP held onto its 51 percent.
Goldwater might consider it a Faustian bargain, but we’ve no reason to think Paul Ryan would agree. As his recent appearance at the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters summit attested, Ryan’s a man of the entire Republican Party. He doesn’t pick and choose. It’s a kind of intellectual ecumenicalism that would’ve had the doctrinaire Goldwater grinding his teeth in frustration. But Goldwater lost. He lost big. Ryan may often write, talk, and think like Goldwater — but he’ll be damned if he’s going to lose like him, too.
Nothing wrong with playing for Team Conservative. I think more liberals should try to play for Team Conservative LIberal and stop all the “to be fair my conservative colleague David” totebag bullshit.
But Ryan is portrayed as man of great principle. If advancing the cause of the People’s Glorious Conservative Revolution — regardless of what policy choices that entails — counts as a great principle, then that is accurate, I suppose.
muddy
Jon Stewart said “totebaggers” the other night.
catclub
“I think more liberals should try to play for Team Conservative and stop all the “to be fair my conservative colleague David” totebag bullshit.”
I think you meant Team Liberal ( or Progressive) here.
Chris
Like a matador, with his pork sword, while we all died of laughter!
Forum Transmitted Disease
He’ll lose, but not like Goldwater. Still, it’s not going to help his subsequent career to be tied to this ticket.
Punchy
I think there’s genuine concern that we are currently so unable to accurately gauge Sullivan’s feelings on Barry Goldwater and gluten-free beer.
Tractarian
Is this post part of your strategy to keep the jobs report up top?
kindness
I see a couple differences between Goldwater and Ryan.
Goldwater did not despise his adversaries, Ryan openly does.
Goldwater wanted what he thought was best for America, Ryan wants what is best for his party and his Daddies.
I have respect for Goldwater. I have none for Ryan.
@Punchy: I haven’t been to Sully’s since ‘Obama lost the election’ the other night. Not sure when I’ll go back but I just don’t care to give him clicks right now.
Violet
@muddy: Seriously? Does TDS staff read Balloon Juice?
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@Tractarian:
It’s been there for hours now.
Cris (without an H)
@Violet: Is Jon Stewart a goon?
The Ancient Randonneur
To be fair Paul Ryan can run a sub 3 hour marathon in 4 hours. That is quite an accomplishment.
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@Chris:
Yes!
reflectionephemeral
What’s more, Ryan voted for NCLB, Medicare Part D, plus the budget-busting Bush fiscal policies. Goldwater was a purist, Ryan’s a team player.
I’d always heard that line as “so you know what he’s after”.
amk
twitterdom
catclub
@Forum Transmitted Disease: During the happy, innocent, halcyon times before the debate, Ryan was also losing his house seat.
Gone… all… gone.
Davis X. Machina
@The Ancient Randonneur: Not conservative enough.
Von Mises can run one in 2:18, and he’s dead.
Cris (without an H)
@amk: They’re warming up. The punchline, next month, is “the voting was rigged.”
Chris
Goldwater lost because he openly proclaimed what he was going to do to the safety net when he was running, before he was in office. (Other reasons too, but that was one of the biggies).
Which is exactly what Paul Ryan’s done by associating his name with the Ryan Plan and then running for VP. No amount of Nixon and Reagan’s racial and cultural shit is going to help him do better than Goldie, especially since it’s a lot weaker now than it was back in those days.
catclub
@amk: But thankfully, you can still trust that crazy relative forwarding emails from the internets to know what is going on,… and be completely unbiased.
Kane
Howard Fineman asks what happened to the predictions that Ryan would elevate a more serious, substantive tone in the campaign?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-fineman/obama-romney-debate_b_1784446.html
Matthew Reid Krell
@Violet: Maybe we do.
The Ancient Randonneur
@Davis X. Machina: Leave it to an Austrian to be the “real thing.” Dead or alive.
amk
Obama at VA today
“Governor Romney was fact-checked by his own campaign”
skewered by his own petard ?
Chris
@kindness:
Goldwater was the last Republican who thought losing your principles was worse than losing an election.
Always worth respecting, but let’s be honest, people like that don’t do well in politics and they never will, regardless of what side of the aisle they’re on.
Quincy
I posted this in the LGM thread on the same article:
Ron Paul strikes me as a much better Goldwater comp. Similar to Goldwater circa about 1960, Paul is very open about his crazy ideas, has a fanatical fringe following concentrated heavily in the party’s younger generation, and has been marginalized by a party establishment that’s terrified of him. Paul will obviously never get the nomination the way Goldwater did, but who knows about his idiot son?
Ryan’s a hothouse flower who has been sucking up to Republican luminaries his entire career. He’s perfectly willing to lie about his policies and principles and hide behind a moderate demeanor to get elected. Not sure who that makes him. A less politically talented Reagan?
WereBear
I am having a good time with the debate: thanks to the Ed Schlultz show, I know that Big Bird, et al, is .012% of the budget.
When I throw this factoid at wingnuts, it is with mockery at their understanding of math.
“Really? Romney is going to balance the budget that way? Now I know why he doesn’t go into details, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”
Davis X. Machina
@Kane:
Cantor and Ryan. Every Robespierre his Danton
Chris
@Quincy:
Yes, exactly!
Like Ron Paul, he disagreed with the “mainstream” on select issues, but like Ron Paul, still completely batshit and would be a disaster if his ideas on foreign policy, economics or civil rights alike were ever implemented. No less extreme or dangerous than the Republican Party we eventually got, just a different kind of extreme.
Davis X. Machina
@The Ancient Randonneur: That’s nothing — von Hayek still runs sub-2:00 Olympic triathlons.
Quincy
@Chris: Paulites have also been using the same kind of tactics with conventions/delegates/party committees that Goldwater loyalists used in the early 60s. Things are a bit more controlled now, and so the powers that be have been able to shut them down before they could make too much headway. But there are a lot of parallels.
Ryan doesn’t have nearly the cajones to buck both the party and the D.C. consensus like that. He’s just a monumentally overrated, intellectually lazy, not very bright pitch person for Beltway conventional wisdom. He’s what Tom Friedman would be if he liked Ayn Rand novels.
Spatula
Elias Isquith is an awesome name to have.
Sounds like a Harry Potter character.
Joel
@muddy: that means stewart or TDS writers (more likely the latter) reads this blog, because I have never heard anyone use that term aside from our own doug j
Chris
@Quincy:
I think their foreign policy stances are another big reason why Paul hasn’t been able to come close to Goldwater. A lot of G’s appeal to the right wing base was his rabid anti-communism, as opposed to Ron Paul’s isolationist position that many of them dismiss as “blame America first” and basically liberal/appeaser. Not a good thing to be post-9/11, not if you’re trying to rally a Republican base.
Ben Cisco
This election feels less like an election and more like an intervention.
Or an intake interview.
Quincy
@Chris: Good point. Goldwater and Paul were/are both apostates in regard to one leg of the Republicans three-legged stool. With Goldwater it was the religious right and with Paul it’s the warmongering. Goldwater nabbed the nomination in part because the religious right wasn’t yet part of the coalition in 1964. Of course, without it, the conservative coalition also wasn’t large enough to stand a chance in the general. Paul has been pulling his maverick act at a time when the coalition is large enough to put a conservative in the white house, but its impossible to win the nomination while displaying open hostility to one of the three legs.
muddy
@Violet: @Joel: Now we can speculate which poster works for TDS.
When he said it, I shouted “DougJ!!” Scared the dog.
Violet
@muddy: Does DougJ work for TDS? Stealthy!
LanceThruster
@kindness:
x2
muddy
@Violet: Yeah, maybe the bits we complain about are DougJ trolling TDS.
catclub
@LanceThruster: I claim shenanigans. Goldwater was the closest they had to ‘crazy as a shithouse rat, and running for Pres’ at the time, and you would have hated him just as much as you presently hate Ryan.
You just think you would like Goldwater more because he is dead now.
Time wounds all heals, or some such.
300baud
The thing wrong with playing for Team Whatever is that it’s just tribalism.
I agree it would be better if more progressives were more active, but asking them to imitate the Republican taste for self-administered lobotomy can only yield Pyrrhic victories.
Eventually the pendulum will swing back and the right will stop being fucking nuts. If at that point the left doesn’t give up Team Liberal for Team America, then we will just be differently fucked.
Palli
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Ryan nows worries that he will lose the Rep seat too. He has just released 2 campaign ads to hedge his bets- wouldn’t it be just deserves if Rob Zerban goes to Congress and finally Ryan has to return to his family’s business (his only non-govenment job, short lived as it was). Oh, sure, he says he worked at McDonalds as a teen but I haven’t seen a W2 to prove it!
Steeplejack
@Joel:
Well, totebagger gets almost 13,000 hits on Google, including a definition in the Urban Dictionary and the names of at least a few blogs. It’s not just a Balloon Juice thing, at least not any more.
auntieeminaz
@catclub: 1964 Goldwater was scary and I loathed him but 1990’s Goldwater was actually kind of lovable. From Wikipedia:
In a 1994 interview with the Washington Post the retired senator said,
When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.[59]
Some of Goldwater’s statements in the 1990s aggravated many social conservatives. He endorsed Democrat Karan English in an Arizona congressional race, urged Republicans to lay off Bill Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and criticized the military’s ban on homosexuals:[59] “Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar.”[65] He also said, “You don’t need to be ‘straight’ to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”[66] A few years before his death he went so far as to address establishment Republicans by saying, “Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you’ve hurt the Republican party much more than the Democrats have.”[citation needed]
In 1996, he told Bob Dole, whose own presidential campaign received lukewarm support from conservative Republicans: “We’re the new liberals of the Republican party. Can you imagine that?”[67] In that same year, with Senator Dennis DeConcini, Goldwater endorsed an Arizona initiative to legalize medical marijuana against the countervailing opinion of social conservatives.[68]
catclub
@auntieeminaz: And that was my point, the 1964 Goldwater running for pres was scary, and incredibly racist. so they would have hated him just as much then as they hate Ryan now.
What states did he win? Miss and Alabama for starters. Sounds familiar.
The 1995 Goldwater is a red (hah!) herring.
Bill Arnold
@Steeplejack:
Playing with the advanced search in google that lets you specify a date range, “totebagger” appears to have appeared in 2005, with http://totebaggery.blogspot.com/
Chris
@300baud:
That is remotely possible, but it’ll be a long time coming. It took a full twenty years of liberal victories in the White House (and for the most part in Congress) for the original Gilded Agers to finally realize that the people had spoken and they needed to adjust (as late as 1948 they still thought they could abolish the New Deal and go back to the way things were).
That group of Gilded Agers had nothing on the present one when it comes to political fanaticism and having their way at all costs, another twenty-year Democratic streak comparable to Roosevelt/Truman isn’t something I see happening either. So I honestly don’t see how the Republican Party could free itself from the fucking nuts in my lifetime (and I’m still on the sunny side of 25). I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.
Chris
@catclub:
No, just a guy who was long past his status as spokesman of the party and could now afford to shoot his mouth off on whatever he wanted.
mclaren
Paul Ryan may not be a man of principle, but he’s definitely a man of principal. On which he doubtless earns high interest.
LanceThruster
@catclub:
It seemed he publicly took some reasonable positions in his elder statesman years, no?
I imagine the shit house rat personnafication (sp?) was the stuff of the Bill Moyers daisy nuke commercial?