Paul Ryan And The GOP's Hardening Heart

As most conservatives swoon over Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's choice to run for vice president, David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's first budget director, isn't impressed:

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

No means tests for entitlements plus cruel safety-net shredding that will punish the poor while saving virtually no money. That's the Tea Party platform in a nutshell, as Timothy Noah wrote in January when he listed all the big-government programs these so-called conservatives love.

There's actually a difference between being conservative and being selfish. In his book Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, E.J. Dionne describes a telling split between tea party thinking and the more compassionate conservatism proclaimed and sometimes practiced by Republicans in other eras:

While 50 percent of white evangelicals and 46 percent of Christian conservatives said 'it is not a big problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,' 64 percent of Tea Party supporters felt that way."

That's two-thirds of the Ryan fan club saying to those who lack the opportunity to thrive, "I've got mine. It might not be your fault you don't have yours, but pound sand anyway." The new America?

No-Spin War Zone

As we prepare for the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, E. J. Dionne cautions readers not to fall for the canard, successfully promoted by the Confederacy's president and vice president, that the cataclysm was about state's rights instead of southerns' desire to preserve slavery at all costs:

After the war, in one of the great efforts of spin control in our history, both [Jefferson] Davis and [Alexander] Stephens, despite their own words, insisted that the war was not about slavery after all but about state sovereignty. By then, of course, slavery was "a dead and discredited institution," [historian James] McPherson wrote, and to "concede that the Confederacy had broken up the United States and launched a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a vain attempt to keep 4 million people in slavery would not confer honor on their lost cause."

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 66

E. J. Dionne endorses President Obama's Anglican approach to foreign policy:

When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options. One is to avoid the problem. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options. The third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.

Afghanistan has presented President Obama with exactly this situation, and he is soon likely to settle on something closest to the third approach. This will make no one very happy. Yet it might be the least dangerous choice.

Banking On National Failure

Studying the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, E. J. Dionne has some advice for the GOP:

Memo to Republicans: Talk a right-wing game in your ideological magazines and at your tea parties if that makes you happy. But to win elections, your candidates had better look like middle-of-the-road problem-solvers.

Of course the right reads that as a call from the left to Republicans to win elections by becoming enablers of the prevailing big government project. Better, the true believers insist, to remain a righteous remnant. Better, as RN said about the Goldwaterites, to be right than President. Better, even, to promote the victory of Democrats over moderate Republicans. Wait in purity and in expectation that economic or foreign policy disaster will once again propel a true believer into power.

Wait, in other words, for Carter and Reagan to come back. Basically Sarah Palin's GOP is banking on bankruptcy.

Guns, Or Better

E. J. Dionne comes pretty close to saying that President Obama should abandon Afghanistan to his big-government agenda.

No Se Puede

E. J. Dionne says Rep. Wilson...didn't tell the truth:

For the record, Wilson's premise is itself untrue: The framers of the health care bill did all they could to make sure it wouldn't help illegal immigrants. Yes, a few might slip through the cracks and--horrors!-- get assistance. But the health reformers wrote language as tough as it could be to make sure this wouldn't happen, short of creating provisions so draconian that some who are here legally would also be denied coverage.

Neocon Nostalgia

In a defense of President Obama's foreign policy, E. J. Dionne., Jr. admits one worry:

If I have qualms about the Obama Doctrine, they have to do with the relatively short shrift it has so far given to concerns over human rights and democracy. The United States cannot impose democracy everywhere, but we should stand up forcefully for democrats, political prisoners and human rights activists anywhere.

A Prayer On Both Your Houses

E. J. Dionne, Jr. (that's Isaiah at right, not E.J.) argues that the increase in the percentage of Americans who say they aren't religious is related to the pervasive association of Christianity with the evangelical, politically activist, generally Republican faction of the faith:

Religion is always corrupted when it gets too close to political power. It's possible to win a precinct caucus and lose your soul, to mistake political victory for salvation itself.

While he may be right, he overlooks what happened a generation or two ago to the mainline Protestant denominations, which began to lose adherents as they become more closely associated with so-called liberal causes such as opposition to the Vietnam war and equity for women and gay and lesbian people. Would Dionne say that religion can be corrupted if it advocates too aggressively for politicians who support green energy and world peace instead of (as in the case of the evangelical cohort) oppose abortion?

As an alternative to spending its time and energy worrying about the swinging ecclesiastical pendulum, I would like to see the church simultaneously become more knowledgeable about politics and policy and yet less emotionally engaged in outcomes, which actually aren't our job. Studying Matthew's account of the Resurrection this Easter, I was struck by what happened to the guards (possibly Roman, but more likely working for the temple authorities) when the angel rolled away the stone in front of Jesus's tomb:

⁴For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.

Likewise, in Isaiah's Fourth Servant Song, which Christians take to be an anticipation of Christ, the prophet says:

Kings shall shut their mouths because of him.

That would be something to see, huh? Secular authority staring divinity in its face and being struck dumb with terror. Obviously the church has spent much of its life promoting fear and guilt, often in a self-serving and emotionally destructive way. And yet there is still something to be said for the fear of God (as opposed to fear of the Pope or parish priest). After all, continues Isaiah, God's ways are not our ways nor God's thoughts our thoughts. It seems to me that politics at its best is inherently cultural, the gospel inherently countercultural. So perhaps the church should be less focused on trying to refashion the state in its image than on modeling a radically different way of living, interacting, and building and sustaining community even in the throes of conflict.

Some in the church love justice, righteousness, and mercy so much that they find it unbearable when governments and political leaders don't do all they can do promote these virtues. The difficulty is that prophecy can breed pride, even zealotry. So today, prophetic Christendom is as fractured as politics, with one faction promoting justice for those who have been born and the other for those who have merely been conceived. Don't we see that in our divisions, we are aping the very secular leaders we so often scorn?

Madame Defarge, Call Your Wine Shop

E. J. Dionne, Jr. hopes populist outrage over the AIG bonuses and other corporate welfare schemes will lead to better public policy -- and not, one hopes, bonus recipients having to continue to worry about their and their families' safety. The fiercely eloquent anonymous poster at "Body Parts" wonders if Congress's probably unconstitutional confiscation of the bonuses could be seen as affirming vigilantism.

When They're Volunteers, You Don't Pay Them

President Obama and Congress are promoting volunteerism, and E. J. Dionne, Jr. thinks it's great. But to promote volunteerism, why do we need an additional federal spending bill?

Let's Check The Federalist Papers And See

E. J. Dionne, Jr. crystallizes the budget debate:

The central issue in American politics now is whether the country should reverse a three-decade long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth.

Politicians will say lots of things in the coming weeks, but they should be pushed relentlessly to address the bottom-line question: Do they believe that a fairer distribution of capitalism's bounty is essential to repairing a sick economy? Everything else is a subsidiary issue.

Rebuilding Liberalism

E. J. Dionne Jr.:

Tuesday night's speech was the most comprehensive manifesto [Obama] has offered yet for his new rendezvous with America's progressive tradition. "We will rebuild," he declared, "we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before." If he is right, he will also have rebuilt American liberalism.

The Magical Scowcroft Effect

Under the tutelage of an acolyte of Henry Kissinger, the foreign policy realists and idealists are switching parties. E. J. Dionne, Jr.:

What's most striking about Obama's approach to foreign policy is that he is less an idealist than a realist who would advance American interests by diplomacy, by working to improve the country's image abroad, and by using military force prudently and cautiously.

This sounds a lot like the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush, and it makes perfect sense that Obama has had conversations with the senior Bush's closest foreign policy adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Obama has drawn counsel from many in Scowcroft's circle, and [Defense chief Robert] Gates himself was deputy national security adviser under Scowcroft.