CONGRESSMAN PAUL RYAN…THE CHALLENGER

Posted By on March 5th, 2010

Belmont Club
March 5th, 2010 4:35 am
Blue Plate Special
Congressman Paul Ryan has had considerable success lately explaining the main problem with health care — and with “social democracy” — in general: it’s unsustainable. It’s an old message which has until recently taken a back seat to the idea that the welfare state was the wave of the future. OpenLeft argued that the hidden message of Star Trek was that in the future humanity would establish a socialist paradise. “The most familiar utopian socialist society would be that of the United Federation of Planets in the popular television series Star Trek – particularly that depicted in The Next Generation. There is no money, no want, no poverty, no crime, no disease or ignorance in human society; everyone works for the advancement of all humanity–as well as the rest of the Federation.”

And bizarre as it may seem, until recently many people would have agreed that socialism was the fate of mankind; that our capitalist world was but an unfortunate expedient, an necessary concession to knuckle draggers until in our enlightenment we could go out and prove our superiority to the Borg. Ryan’s great achievement was to start a hairline crack in that crystal vision; to point out that for utopia to exist we first have to afford it; and under socialism we can’t. Fortune calls Paul Ryan “Obama’s Adversary”, not just in the party politics sense, but memetically. He’s gently pointed out that Hope and Change might be simply be a nightmare tricked out as a dream. But he’s made an even more radical assertion: that the world can have a future it doesnt have to buy on credit.

Republicans aren’t the only ones suddenly taking notice of Ryan’s views on deficit reduction and government spending. During his now-famous appearance at the Republican congressional retreat in Baltimore earlier this year, the President singled out Ryan. …

Ryan got his chance to confront the President at the health-care summit Feb. 25. Seated across from Obama, Ryan addressed him directly with a six-minute, numbers-laden, wonkish analysis of the Senate bill that contradicted the administration’s pledge that the plan wouldn’t add to the mountainous deficit. … Obama steered the discussion away from Ryan’s numbers, and the White House hasn’t challenged his analysis.

The health care debate was the congressman’s great moment and the press is likely to pitch it as consequent to his own personal charisma, that fount from which all political success is believed to come. But it isn’t Ryan that bears watching so much as the sudden respectability of his message. Mario Continetti of the Weekly Standard describes him as a kind of anti-Obama in the sense that he yearns for a different heaven and fears a different hell. While “President Obama wants to reshape the American economy and welfare state so that it looks more like a Western European social democracy”, Ryan wants to build a future based on something people can actually afford, “and since fiscal policy is Ryan’s specialty, he’s become the GOP point man when it comes to entitlements and health care.” What the Congressman has on his side is arithmetic of money, which even Chris Matthews has to respect. Watch this exchange.

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