{"id":5064,"date":"2012-08-12T14:54:19","date_gmt":"2012-08-12T20:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/?p=5064"},"modified":"2012-08-12T14:54:19","modified_gmt":"2012-08-12T20:54:19","slug":"e-j-dionne-paul-ryan-and-the-triumph-of-theory-the-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/election\/e-j-dionne-paul-ryan-and-the-triumph-of-theory-the-washington-post\/","title":{"rendered":"E.J. Dionne: Paul Ryan and the triumph of theory – The Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

E.J. Dionne: Paul Ryan and the triumph of theory – The Washington Post<\/a> <\/p>\n

\n
By E.J. Dionne Jr.<\/a>, Sunday, August 12, 12:10 PMThe Washington Post<\/h5>\n

If Paul Ryan<\/a> were a liberal, conservatives would describe him as a creature of Washington who has spent virtually all of his professional life as a congressional aide, a staffer at an ideological think tank and, finally, as a member of Congress. In the right\u2019s shorthand: He never met a payroll.<\/p>\n

If they were in a sunny mood, these conservatives would readily concede that Ryan is a nice guy who\u2019s fun to talk to. But they\u2019d also insist that he is an impractical ideologue. He holds an almost entirely theoretical view of the world defined by big ideas that never touch the ground and devotes little energy to considering how his proposed budgets might affect the lives of people he\u2019s never met. \u2026<\/p>\n

How can Ryan justify his Medicaid cuts<\/a> when, as the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found, they would likely leave 14 million to 19 million poor people without health coverage? How can he justify tax proposals that, as The New Republic\u2019s Alec MacGillis<\/a> pointed out, would reduce the rate on Mitt Romney\u2019s rather substantial income to less than 1 percent? How can he claim his budgets are anti-deficit measures when, as The Post\u2019s Matt Miller has noted, his tax cuts would add trillions to the debt and we wouldn\u2019t be in balance until somewhere around 2030<\/a>? \u2026<\/p>\n

But the issue in this election will be how Americans want to be governed. Republicans mock President Obama for still thinking like the professor he once was, yet in this race, Obama — far more than today\u2019s conservative theorists and to the occasional consternation of his more liberal supporters \u2014 is the pragmatist. He\u2019s talking about messy trade-offs: between taxes and spending, government and the private sector, dreams and the facts on the ground. In embracing Ryan, Romney has tied himself to the world of high conservative ideology. As liberals learned long ago, ideology usually loses. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

E.J. Dionne: Paul Ryan and the triumph of theory – The Washington Post<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

E.J. Dionne: Paul Ryan and the triumph of theory – The Washington Post By E.J. Dionne Jr., Sunday, August 12, 12:10 PMThe Washington Post If Paul Ryan were a liberal, conservatives would describe him as a creature of Washington who has spent virtually all of his professional life as a congressional aide, a staffer at … Continue reading E.J. Dionne: Paul Ryan and the triumph of theory – The Washington Post<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5065,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5064\/revisions\/5065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}