The mantle of leadership has shifted: Romney/Ryan govern in all but name

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
I am truly amused by all of the ad hominem attacks that this forum has against first, Mitt Romney and now his chosen running mate, Paul Ryan.

Such delicious name calling, such panicked hatred, such flailing at shadows and tilting at windmills.

So much ado about nothing.

Baseless viciousness does work to an extent, the polls seemed for a short moment to be turning, but now something else is at work.

Perhaps it is that for all of the bluster, there is nothing to back it up.

If the Democrats had a record to run on, the would be the first to point to it.

If they had a plan, they would announce it.

If they had a budget, they would present it.

If they had a future to offer, they would show us all how we would get there.

They don't, so they won't.

So something has shifted. People have started to see that there actually is an alternative.

Someone does have a plan and is willing to lay it out in detail.

Someone is stepping up to the plate, even as the opposing team is flinging knuckle-balls and curses at them.

Suddenly, someone is showing leadership and the contrast is so dramatic that the election is turning.

Romney-Ryan-Laughing.png


THE MANTLE OF LEADERSHIP HAS SHIFTED : ROMNEY, RYAN GOVERN IN ALL BUT NAME

by JOEL B. POLLAK 17 Aug 2012

In the first week since Paul Ryan joined Mitt Romney on the Republican ticket, something subtle yet fundamental has happened to the country--something not yet reflected in poll numbers or punditry: the mantle of leadership has shifted.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden (certainly the latter) occupy office but cannot be said to govern in any meaningful way beyond formalities. Obama avoids the media; Biden has been sent back to Delaware; and their vast auxiliary army of super PACs and community organizers is reduced to petty sniping and personal attacks. No one expects any truly new ideas or proposals to come out of the Obama campaign anymore. It is telling that the only real debate this week was between Romney and Ryan's Medicare policies, not Obama's.

The honest reflections of the more thoughtful voices on the American left confirm that Romney and Ryan are, in effect, leading the country.

First there was William Saletan of Slate, who wrote--without irony: "A wonderful thing has happened for this country. Paul Ryan will be the Republican nominee for vice president." He added that Republicans like Ryan were the perfect antidote to Democratic excesses: "Maybe, like me, you were raised in a liberal household. You don’t agree with conservative ideas on social or foreign policy. But this is why God made Republicans: to force a reality check when Democrats overpromise and overspend."

That reaction found echoes in praise for Ryan offered by veteran Democrat Erskine Bowles of the president's own fiscal commission, among others. Other Democrats--notably former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, the state's first African-American governor, and none too impressed with Biden's offensive appeals to racial resentment--began to consider crossing party lines to support the Republican ticket, even if just this once.

Eli Zaretsky, writing for the hard-left, pro-Occupy, pro-Palestinian Tikkun magazine, admitted candidly:

Now leftists are exploding with joy at Romney’s supposed mistake in choosing the easily attacked Ryan as his running mate. Perhaps leftists might reconsider their own credibility as political analysts in evaluating the Republican strategy.

Let us begin with the obvious. Obama cannot run on his record, since it is a record of failure. Therefore, he was always going to run a scare campaign, explaining how bad the Republicans are. In choosing Ryan, Romney has not made this easier for Obama — it was always easy. Rather, he showed that he is not afraid of Obama’s scare tactics, and of the Democrat’s ad hominem attacks on him — rich, unfeeling, out of touch, and all the rest.

In choosing Ryan, what Romney showed above all was courage--or, more precisely, the absence of fear. Eighty years ago, a great Democratic president comforted the nation by telling it that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." That comfort and confidence is what Romney and Ryan now offer Americans, while Obama ducks questions, Biden hurls bombs, and Democrat surrogates find the old weapons no longer work.

There was a telling moment, shortly after he was chosen, when Paul Ryan faced reporters on the campaign plane and said simply: "We're going to win this campaign." It was not bluster; it was simple self-assurance.

There is a long way to go on this campaign trail, and Romney and Ryan will have to fight for every vote. But now they will be tested not as candidates, but as leaders of the nation. That is what they have already won.
 

Bowfinger

Lifer
Nov 17, 2002
15,776
392
126
Yet another GOP puff piece from Breitbart. Anand should charge you for posting political ads.
 
Feb 10, 2000
30,029
66
91
Good God - far too many calories were burned in writing that Breitbart claptrap in the first place, and the OP wasted yet more writing his silly intro to it.

There is nothing "brave" about Romney's pick of Ryan, any more than it was "brave" for McCain to have picked Palin (in fact I'd argue it was less brave). Ryan was chosen to try to invigorate a moribund campaign whose poll numbers continue to flag. The polling since Ryan was announced as Romney's running mate suggests this effort failed.

It's amusing to me that the article claims Romney has concrete and detailed plans for the future, including but not limited to a budget, when in fact the only thing concrete about his campaign has been its staunch opposition to President Obama. While it is true Representative Ryan has announced a detailed budget (in his tenure in the House), Romney appears to materially part ways with it in a number of respects.

I am also amused by the entirely baseless claim that Romney and Ryan are "in effect, leading the country," when Romney lost in his only election for national office (when he ran against Ted Kennedy), and even his own party is clearly lukewarm at best about him as a candidate. If, as seems likelier than not, President Obama is re-elected, will we still be hearing about how Romney is "in effect, leading the country"?
 

Jaskalas

Lifer
Jun 23, 2004
33,382
7,445
136
Suddenly, someone is showing leadership and the contrast is so dramatic that the election is turning.

I agree, the general election campaign has finally begun. Life can be seen from Team Romney for the first time. The ball is in Obama's court. May remain there until the first debate.
 

monovillage

Diamond Member
Jul 3, 2008
8,444
1
0
I'm enjoying how PJABBER has united P&N...
against himself. :D

Some of us enjoy PJABBER, but what I really love is the panicked and scared reaction he gets from the usual libertard suspects. The foaming at the mouth as they attack and spew against him is too much fun.
 

Charles Kozierok

Elite Member
May 14, 2012
6,762
1
0
Good God - far too many calories were burned in writing that Breitbart claptrap in the first place, and the OP wasted yet more writing his silly intro to it.

Whenever I read self-congratulatory gibberish like the first post here, I get the feeling the writer is trying to convince himself moreso than anyone else.

There is nothing "brave" about Romney's pick of Ryan, any more than it was "brave" for McCain to have picked Palin (in fact I'd argue it was less brave). Ryan was chosen to try to invigorate a moribund campaign whose poll numbers continue to flag. The polling since Ryan was announced as Romney's running mate suggests this effort failed.

Correct on both counts.

In fact, even right-leaning Rasmussen currently has Obama up for the first time in a couple of weeks.

It's amusing to me that the article claims Romney has concrete and detailed plans for the future, including but not limited to a budget, when in fact the only thing concrete about his campaign has been its staunch opposition to President Obama.

Also correct. Romney has repeatedly taken flak for having presented no specifics about just about anything. He's pretty much admitted it to, basically saying he doesn't want to put out any details because he's afraid they'll be attacked.

Romney's campaign is 100% about getting people to vote against Obama.

I am also amused by the entirely baseless claim that Romney and Ryan are "in effect, leading the country," when Romney lost in his only election for national office (when he ran against Ted Kennedy), and even his own party is clearly lukewarm at best about him as a candidate.

This is standard partisan idiocy, heard it in 2008 also.
 

PJABBER

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
4,822
0
0
Some of us enjoy PJABBER, but what I really love is the panicked and scared reaction he gets from the usual libertard suspects. The foaming at the mouth as they attack and spew against him is too much fun.

Rule Of The Internet #19. The more you hate it, the stronger it gets.


Feel the power, minions. :twisted:





:whiste:
 

MooseNSquirrel

Platinum Member
Feb 26, 2009
2,587
318
126
I'm going to play this game too!

Romney, Republicans And Responsibility

It has always seemed to me that a core principle of Anglo-American conservatism has always been personal responsibility. We are all human and we all screw up all the time - but taking responsibility for both good and bad decisions is a prerequisite for democratic accountability in a free society. George W Bush famously summarized the GOP's current view of such accountability and responsibility by saying that in eight years, he had only one accountability moment - and that was the 2004 election. The authorization of a war on empirically false grounds, the resort to illegal torture, the tens of thousands of civilian deaths from the Iraq occupation: none of this was or is Bush's responsibility, according to the GOP. Bush even made a joke about the WMDs at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

This flight from responsibility is also, alas, baked deep in today's one percent, and marks them as very different from their wealthy predecessors in the American elite for much of the last century. The bankers whose recklessness precipitated our current recession see no reason to take responsibility for the misery their gambling and greed bestowed on so many others. Indeed, they shamelessly lobby to remove any constraints on their reckless ways, continue to gamble with glee (see JP Morgan), and continue to hand themselves bonuses and salaries out of any proportion to the benefits they bring to society as a whole.

And the financial elite is mirrored by the political elite. Those directly involved with or openly supportive of war crimes under Bush and Cheney - far from being held accountable - were given op-ed columns at the Washington Post and sinecures at AEI. A vice-president who openly boasted of torturing prisoners just held a fundraiser for the current nominee. No one in the cabinet responsible for Abu Ghraib resigned. The Republicans refuse to take any responsibility for the massive debt we accumulated since 2000 and have, indeed, tried to shift the entire responsibility onto Obama's shoulders.
Mitt Romney wants to take credit for all the successes at Bain while he was CEO, but also refuses to take responsibility for the actions of his own company which was still employing him and paying him a six figure salary. In fact even to ask a simple question as to whether he was CEO and therefore whether his testimony in 2002 was perjurious is to provoke Romney into a harrumph that included the words "disgusting".
The reason America's elite finds itself under so much criticism is not that they are elites. It is that they have become self-serving, accountability-free elites. Romney's pique that he could even be challenged to take responsibility for a company of which he was legally CEO is a perfect symbol of this abdication of responsibility. Think of the contrast with his father - a man who actually ran an industrial business well, who expressed solidarity with the civil rights movement when so many didn't, released twelve years of tax returns to prove he wasn't gaming anything, and invited reporters in for a Sunday service at his local LDS church.

George Romney clearly felt that with great wealth comes great responsibility and accountability. Mitt is fine with the wealth part; just not the responsibility and accountability. Which is a pretty good summary of what has gone wrong with American conservatism today.
 

Rainsford

Lifer
Apr 25, 2001
17,515
0
0
Some of us enjoy PJABBER, but what I really love is the panicked and scared reaction he gets from the usual libertard suspects. The foaming at the mouth as they attack and spew against him is too much fun.

I hear this argument all the time from conservatives (almost as if a lot of people get all their political views from the same source... ;)) and I still don't get it. If a conservative is able to do something that draws a negative liberal response, the story is that it must be because the liberals are "scared" of the conservative. I can certainly see the appeal of that world view, since it means nothing a conservative does is stupid or ill considered or bad politics...it's just proof that liberals are scared. In fact, the dumber conservatives act, the more this story convinces them that they're doing the right thing. Sarah Palin wasn't an idiot who was totally unqualified for national leadership, in fact she was SO GOOD that she scared liberals into just pretending they thought she was dumb (you know, because they were scared).

But I don't think it's a very effective argument for anyone who didn't already drink the Kool-aid. People saying dumb stuff and then claiming victory when people point out they're saying dumb stuff just makes them look dumber. Not only don't they understand the problem with what they said in the first place, but they have some fantasy interpretation of the criticism they draw.
 

monovillage

Diamond Member
Jul 3, 2008
8,444
1
0
I hear this argument all the time from conservatives (almost as if a lot of people get all their political views from the same source... ;)) and I still don't get it. If a conservative is able to do something that draws a negative liberal response, the story is that it must be because the liberals are "scared" of the conservative. I can certainly see the appeal of that world view, since it means nothing a conservative does is stupid or ill considered or bad politics...it's just proof that liberals are scared. In fact, the dumber conservatives act, the more this story convinces them that they're doing the right thing. Sarah Palin wasn't an idiot who was totally unqualified for national leadership, in fact she was SO GOOD that she scared liberals into just pretending they thought she was dumb (you know, because they were scared).

But I don't think it's a very effective argument for anyone who didn't already drink the Kool-aid. People saying dumb stuff and then claiming victory when people point out they're saying dumb stuff just makes them look dumber. Not only don't they understand the problem with what they said in the first place, but they have some fantasy interpretation of the criticism they draw.

It wasn't this single post, but several of his recent post that have drawn partisan attacks against him. I'm showing support for an underdog in this forum and getting some laughs at the extremists that focus on him instead of what he's posting.

You post as if the left/liberals never do the same thing in this forum and of course we know that's pure bullshit. (Huffpo anyone?) troll threads like the "Republicans in PA support voter fraud" anyone?
Hey Rainsford let me introduce you to a kettle I know.
 

Steeplerot

Lifer
Mar 29, 2004
13,051
6
81
Hilarious, I love the crackpot Palestinian source to somehow gain legitimacy of the message. I am sure it works with the right who think they are terrorists.

The irony of the right suddenly using a group they consider terrorists as allies against a Democratic President is delicious.

Hmm, very Reaganesque terrorist coddling enemy of my enemy is my friend against a Democratic President. Man, you all are really going back to the glory days in your desperation eh?
 

MovingTarget

Diamond Member
Jun 22, 2003
8,999
109
106
Yawn. The only "leadership" that Romney/Ryan have displayed thus far amounts to "look at me! Look at me! Look at me!".

Obama does have a record to run on. So do Romney and Ryan. I look forward to the eventual debates. It is there that Obama will clench his second term. The GOP must self-destruct in order for sanity to return to the right wing. Mark your calendar for January.