Posted on 08/17/2012 11:06:47 AM PDT by Kaslin
Mitt Romney showed he's reaching not just for a win, but for a mandate.
The elevation of Rep. Paul Ryan is a game changer because it is a conversation changer. His selection as veep nominee puts front and center the need to reign in the spending of a government that borrows 40 cents from China for every dollar it spends.
But, to me, the most interesting thing about Ryan is the story of his hometown -- Janesville, Wisc. In Janesville lies Paul Ryan's beating heart.
Filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein spent nine hours filming Ryan as part of a documentary, "As Goes Janesville," that will be aired on PBS the night before the election. But Ryan clips did not make the final cut. So now Lichtenstein is releasing them sequentially in two-minute sound bites on his Web page at vimeo.com/371productions/videos.
For Ryan, who fell in love as a teenager with Ayn Rand's novels, his lifelong task has been to reconcile community and capitalism.
On Lichtenstein's camera, Ryan tells us how he does that.
The story begins with his great-great-grandfather James Ryan, who came over during the Potato Famine. "They stopped growing potatoes in Ireland, or the potatoes stopped growing in Ireland. ... James came over from Ireland, I think he came to Boston, worked the railroad in order to get enough money to buy the farm." Winter came as a rude shock, but James Ryan decided to stick it out and make a go of it.
The next link in the Ryan saga is James Ryan's son, P.W. Ryan, who started a railroad embankment firm using horse plows. "That was the beginning of Ryan Inc., which is a family excavating firm which my cousins now run. That's fourth generation. And so our family has been there ever since. I think last time I counted, I have 67 cousins in Janesville, and we all live within about four or five blocks of each other."
This is indeed an Irish clan, but a little different from the Kennedy model.
"So what's neat about my particular family," Ryan says, "is a lot of us in my generation have gone away to school, gone away to work in big cities in the East and West Coast and so many of my siblings and my cousins have all come back to Janesville. ... You know why? Because it's a great place to raise a family; it's a wonderful place to grow up; it's a wonderful place to live.
So many young Ryans tasted London and Los Angeles, New York and Washington -- and they ended up back in Janesville together.
What makes that possible? For Ryan, it is capitalism and the freedom it provides to innovate and to own that makes his family and his community possible.
"The question is can more and more people do things like that if we have the economy that allows that to happen?" he asks.
In another segment (vimeo.com/47491264), Ryan explains what makes him tick:
"There are three things about my job that get me going. ... One, you can help people with specific problems in their lives ... at a very tough time in their lives. That's really rewarding. That's constituent service."
The next thing Ryan says is very telling: He loves to put ideas into legislation that make people's lives better. "That's the second great thing about this job."
But then he gets his Irish up and admits that a good intellectual donnybrook is, well, fun for him. "The third great thing about this job is just basically ideas. I love ideas, I love good ideas, I love the competition of ideas, I love debating ideas -- and in my mind, in what I do, it's about ideas that make life better for people."
He goes on: "What I see myself doing is engaged in a defense of the ideas that built this country. ... That is exciting to me. That's why I do what I do."
Most politicians are people driven, not idea driven. Ryan is the exception who understands that foundational ideas are, for better or for worse, powerful. They affect real people's lives. President Obama is another exception. By tapping Ryan, Mitt Romney has now shown he understands this too.
As Paul Ryan told Fox News, "We owe the country a clear choice and different solutions."
Oh please, the Ryan hero worship is unseemly. He’s just another crappy Republican, good on a few items but really sucks on immigration and big gov spending. At least he’s better than Biden.
“The elevation of Rep. Paul Ryan is a game changer because it is a conversation changer. His selection as veep nominee puts front and center the need to reign in the spending of a government that borrows 40 cents from China for every dollar it spends.”
Ryan is an honest to goodness conservative, that is without dispute in my thinking. However, he will only effectively “change the conversation” while an election is going on. Should Myth succeed in winning, then he will lock Ryan in a closet the moment he interferes with Myth’s leftest roots.
IF you want to see the conversation changed for good...figure out some way to get rid of Romney now and elevate Ryan to lead the ticket. Otherwise, for all his bonafide goodness, Ryan is merely window dressing to fool the conservative base to vote for Romney rather than merely vote against Obama. You get a higher turnout that way. Myth realized he had to shore up his base....he didn’t have some sort of conversion to being conservative.
That is so short-sighted...because, desirable as it may be, it's never going to happen.
Wouldn't it be far more productive to, for example, mount a vocal and effective support group for Ryan's plans and keep them front and center from Romney's inauguration forward?
Having shot down down amnesty, we've discovered that we can have an impact -- if we remain united. Let's try to leverage our strengths, rather than dilute them.
“Wouldn’t it be far more productive to, for example, mount a vocal and effective support group for Ryan’s plans and keep them front and center from Romney’s inauguration forward?”
No, because Ryan will become irrelevant to Romney once he is elected. Once you put him in office, he will do as he pleases. You are not going to be able to control Romney once he is elected.....he only picked Ryan to get the votes he would bring by shoring up the base. Once in office, Romney will move left of center and “attempt” to woo democrats into his control...just like in Mass. It is how he operates.
That is so short-sighted, SV...because, desirable as it may be, it's never going to happen.
Wouldn't it be far more productive to, for example, mount a vocal and effective support group for Ryan's plans and keep them front and center from Romney's inauguration forward?
Having shot down down amnesty, we've discovered that we can have an impact -- if we remain united. Let's try to leverage our strengths, rather than dilute them.
So, it's all hopeless, then. The country is doomed. Conservatism is at its end. All is lost.
We should give up and accept our fate.
That's what you propose?
Sorry, I've got a different idea...
Well said, and I think voters are going to respond positively to Ryan's enthusiasm.
I believe so too
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