Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. Note who holds the podium. (Darren Hauck/Reuters)
Rep. Paul Ryan
is the Republican Party. Two profiles of Ryan and his place in the party demonstrate that Ryan is the agenda-setter for this election, and Mitt Romney is just the vehicle Republicans have settled on to make that agenda happen. Here's
The New York Times on Ryan,
calling him "the most influential policy maker in the Republican Party, its de facto head of economic policy, intent on a fundamental transformation of the federal government."
His prescriptions in the Republican budget plan he devised have become his party’s marching orders: cut income tax rates and simplify the code, privatize Medicare, shrink the food-stamp and Medicaid programs and turn almost all control over to the states, and reduce domestic federal spending to its smallest share of the economy since World War II.
Outside of Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Ryan may be the party’s most important figure, said William Bennett, the conservative luminary and a mentor of Mr. Ryan’s going back to the congressman’s early 20s.
Some conservatives say Mr. Bennett might have the reality reversed. “Paul Ryan effectively captured the Republican presidential candidates,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a member of the House Republican leadership, said admiringly. [...]
Grover Norquist, the Republican strategist who heads Americans for Tax Reform, said in an interview that he did not expect Mr. Romney to lead as president. He just wants him to sign the bills that put Mr. Ryan’s vision into practice.
The
second profile, by Jonathon Chait in
New York Magazine, confirms Ryan's place at the head of the party, with Romney just along for ride.
“Now, we are truly at an inflection point, between the Barack Obama and Paul Ryan approaches to government,” National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote recently, treating the elevation of the chairman of the House Budget Committee over the presidential nominee as his party’s standard-bearer as so obvious it requires no explanation. [...] In any case, Romney has shown no inclination to challenge Ryan, praising him fulsomely and even promising him, according to The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, he’d enact Ryan’s plan in the first 100 days. Republicans envision an administration in which Romney has relegated himself to a kind of head-of-state role, at least domestically, with Ryan as the actual head of government.
It's an ideology of extremism that has completely overtaken the Republican Party, which is why Romney has bent himself over backwards to be the "severely conservative" candidate embracing Ryan, genuflecting to him. That's what this election is going to be about, a starker contrast than we've seen yet between the parties, as President Obama
says in this
Rolling Stone interview.
I think the general election will be as sharp a contrast between the two parties as we've seen in a generation. You have a Republican Party, and a presumptive Republican nominee, that believes in drastically rolling back environmental regulations, that believes in drastically rolling back collective-bargaining rights, that believes in an approach to deficit reduction in which taxes are cut further for the wealthiest Americans, and spending cuts are entirely borne by things like education or basic research or care for the vulnerable.
It's also what makes the stakes so high in this election. Consider just for a moment what we could be seeing on the courts. This, for example: U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Janice Rogers Brown and her concurrence on a case that isn't remarkable but for the
insanely extreme Rogers Brown rant:
America’s cowboy capitalism was long ago disarmed by a democratic process increasingly dominated by powerful groups with economic interests antithetical to competitors and consumers. And the courts, from which the victims of burdensome regulation sought protection, have been negotiating the terms of surrender since the 1930s.
That's today's Republican Party, and that's the kind of Ryan-approved Supreme Court nominee we would see from Romney.