Paul Ryan and the triumph of theory

[Lucy Goosey]

In making Ryan his running mate, Mitt Romney guaranteed that this election will be about big principles, but he also underscored a little-noted transformation in American politics: Liberals and conservatives have switched sides on the matter of which camp constitutes the party of theory and which is the party of practice. Americans usually reject the party of theory, which is what conservatism has now become.

Now, it is liberals who question conservative master plans and point to the costs of conservative dreams. And in Ryan and his budget proposals, they have been gifted with the perfect foil.

How can Ryan justify his Medicaid cuts 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’s Alec MacGillis pointed out, would reduce the rate on Mitt Romney’s rather substantial income to less than 1 percent? How can he claim his budgets are anti-deficit measures when, as The Post’s Matt Miller has noted, his tax cuts would add trillions to the debt and we wouldn’t be in balance until somewhere around 2030?

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’s conservative theorists and to the occasional consternation of his more liberal supporters — is the pragmatist. He’s 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.

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-paul-ryan-and-the-triumph-of-theory/2012/08/12/2fa48a94-e4a4-11e1-8f62-58260e3940a0_story.html

[Turbineguy]

1. The principle that

you can base an economic policy of a work of fiction.

Although the sex in Atlas Shrugged was pretty good.