Ryan to the Right

Mitt Romney will try to move as near to the center of the political spectrum as he can and count on Paul Ryan to hold the attention of the far right voters.
by Charlie Leck

I have fact-checked the following as carefully as I could – I’m quite sure it is accurate.

Just so you know!
In 2010 Paul Ryan, current candidate for Vice President of the United States, voted for a bill in the House of Representatives that would limit abortion rights and a woman’s access to contraceptive care. Ryan voted for a bill that would ban abortion in all cases (obviously, all is the key word here). It seems that would include cases of incest and rape. The bill was called The Sanctity of Human Life Act and Ryan was signed on as a co-sponsor. Ryan also voted for a bill that would allow hospitals to refuse to perform abortions even as part of a procedure to save a woman’s life. This latter matter really upsets me. Some pro-life groups even blasted the law, calling it the Let Women Die Act.

Ryan’s inflexibility and unwillingness to compromise!
This is a part of the Ryan make-up and character that we’ll have to take a very careful look at. We’ve gone through a lot of bad years in this country because of political inflexibility and stubbornness. We can’t keep going this way. Let’s take a look at the Ryan record over the next few weeks to see where Ryan is on this character trait.

On matters of the budget, future government spending and fiscal responsibility, Ryan appears to be rather inflexible and rigid. One must remember that he was the central author of “The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise.” [Italics mine!]  Just take note of the title! It isn’t a path, or a possible path, or a path to consider. It is THE path, which really does imply there are no alternatives worth debating. “A matter of semantics,” some of you might say. Well, let’s watch over the coming weeks and see what kind of flexibility he shows.

I’ll be writing here about these matters as I begin reviewing the Ryan record over his last two terms in Congress.

The Michele Bachmann factor
My regular readers know full-well how I feel about Michele Bachmann and the disdain in which I hold her. She has the most twisted ideas about democracy and personal freedoms that I have ever encountered. Bachman is a biblical literalist. These types really don’t understand scripture and they try to use it (the Bible) in dangerous ways.

Bachmann is a dangerous person and she’s shown that very clearly in some of her recent statements about people of the Islam faith in America. She sent shivers of embarrassment down the backs of most Americans a few weeks ago when she did her extremely good Senator Joseph McCarthy imitation.

Well, when you look carefully at the congressional records, you discover that Ryan and Bachmann are an awful lot alike (granting, of course, that Ryan is not the complete dumb-bell and asinine fool that Bachmann is). When one analyzes his voting record, one discovers that Ryan is every bit as conservative as Bachmann (see this article by Nate Silver).

In the article referenced above, Silver points to voting statistics that indicate Ryan is further to the right of center, based on his voting in Congress, than Obama is left of center.

Yesterday, Jessica Pieklo wrote the following in a blog-post on Care2… Dispatches from the War on Women: Meet Paul Ryan.

“In 2008 when then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate for good or for bad the choice was in part to try and connect with women voters. This Saturday we learned the Republican party is no longer even interested in trying. Sure, Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) may be the first perfectly-coiffed ticket from the right, but Romney’s choice in Ryan represents one of the most extreme anti-woman candidates available. In addition to his horrific budget, Ryan co-sponsored a federal fetal personhood bill, voted to defund Planned Parenthood, and wants to write discrimination into the Constitution by amending it to ban gay marriage. It’s the classic Republican rouse: talk about “economics” while legislating to restrict women’s rights, so if you liked the aftermath of the 2010 midterm elections you’re going to love a Romney-Ryan administration.”

Here’s my personal opinion… Ryan was chosen to shore up the voters to Romney’s right. Romney will continue to work on convincing America that he is a moderate and he’ll try to capture the high ground in the center. Ryan will be in charge of holding on to the right – the same task Sarah Palin was given four years ago, but couldn’t pull off.

The battle lines for this election have been drawn. Now we can begin to watch the polling results. At least twice a week, now through Election Day, I’ll report here on what the polls are showing.

The current polls
Current polls (by averaging all the national polls) give Obama an approximately 4 percentage point advantage (with 237 electoral votes). These polls show Obama winning Wisconsin by about 5 percentage points and it will be interesting to see if there is a shift there now that one of the state's own will be on the Republican ticket. This morning's rally for Ryan in Wisconsin was extremely well attended.

The FOX News poll gives Obama an approximate 9 percentage point lead -- the largest of any national poll in the country. Because it is such an anomaly, the poll result isn't taken too seriously.

A 4 point lead, when there is a 2 point margin of error, is a danged close race. It appears to me that the Obama-Romney debates are going to have a very significant impact on who will win this election in 2012. Another factor will, of course, be the performance of the economy over the next two months. It will be watched closely.

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