Golf cart overpass, The Villages, FL
The selection of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan as vice-presidential nominee has left behind-the-scenes Republicans concerned that he and his budget open up new vulnerabilities for the GOP on Medicare. That might be what the professional pants-wetters inside the Beltway are saying ... but is the midwestern manly-man concerned? Not at all! He plans to go on the offense and charge right into the
middle of Florida on Saturday morning, to face legions of angry seniors and win them over.
There's just one thing that Ryan is taking along with him, though ... a human shield. In the form of his mother, who'll be accompanying him to Saturday's event. You might be thinking "Awww, that's nice," or you might be thinking "Dude, that's weak, hiding behind your mom," but it's more than just a display of either familial love or cowardice; it's also a page right out of the Republican strategy memo.
Politico's Charlie Mahtesian recently got his hands on an NRCC strategy video that was released last Sunday, providing advice to Republican campaigners on how to fight back the coming Medicare onslaught. You can watch the entire 10-minute presentation below if you're a real glutton for punishment, but if you don't want to, they break it down into five handy bullet points (although note that only three of those are usable action items):
• Inoculate by pledging to save and protect Medicare; use credible third party validators (mom or seniors)
• Collect hard evidence that your Democrat opposes repealing 'Obamacare'
• Create a clear choice with your Democrat for backing 'Obamacare' and $500 billion in Medicare cuts
• Republicans can actually WIN the Medicare fight
• Once Medicare is litigated, the race focuses on economic issues
(Continue reading below the fold)
Their evidence that this approach works is the special election fought last year in NV-02 to replace Dean Heller, where Republican now-Rep. Mark Amodei easily defeated Democrat Kate Marshall. One of the highlights of the race was two Medicare-themed ads where Amodei's mom vouched for the fact that Amodei would never cut Medicare. Therefore, in Republican-land, that's how you inoculate yourself on the Medicare issue and win, QED. (With no consideration of the facts that the DCCC didn't get at all involved in this Republican-leaning district while the NRCC and its allies spent over $800K ... while the DCCC did get actively involved and fought hard on the Medicare in the special election in similarly-red-hued NY-26 around the same time, a race that Dem Kathy Hochul won.)
So where is Ryan going, in order to find those smiling senior faces to use as a backdrop (a.k.a. "credible third party validators")? His appearance will be at The Villages, a massive retirement community that's really a city unto itself, partway in between Orlando and Gainesville in the until-recently-empty wastes of central Florida. The Villages—which grew from 8,000 residents in 2000 to over 50,000 today—is well-known as a Republican stronghold, one of the darkest-red places in the whole state. You might remember it was one of the settings for Sarah Palin's veep rollout four years ago, where at least 30,000 seniors turned out to see her. There's also the matter of how much Republican campaign money comes from The Villages:
The retirement location itself made a hefty corporate donation to the main super PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential bid. The Villages of Lake Sumter, Inc., the Florida retirement community that includes property development, golf and other recreational activities, donated $250,000 to Restore Our Future last June. Five individual residents donated a total of over $678,000 to the group, which also received money from utility, communications, commercial property, and investment companies located in The Villages, Fla.
On its surface, the Villages looks about as idyllic and problem-free place as you can imagine: 486 holes of year-round golf, most of which are free to residents, and a community almost free of crime ... and even almost free of people who might walk around looking like they might be considering committing a crime. In the
2010 census, 0.3 percent of its population is under 18 (thanks to exemptions from the Fair Housing Act for senior communities), 3.7 percent of its population lives in poverty, 96.9 percent are homeowners, and 98.2 percent are white.
Of course, that kind of monoculture is hardly unique among affluent gated retirement communities. What's particularly interesting about the Villages is the amount of top-down control exerted by its developers, and the opaqueness they operate in. Developer Gary Morse (a big contributor to Republican causes, as mentioned above) owns nearly everything, including the spaces in the community's fake "downtowns" leased to appropriate retailers and even many of the retailers themselves, like the golf cart dealership.
And since The Villages isn't incorporated, there's no particular accountability for Morse or his administrators. That's thanks to Florida's laws on community development districts (originating with the changes to the law the state made in order to accommodate Walt Disney's move in to the state in the 1960s), which essentially lets developers assume responsibility for all the infrastructure in their fiefdoms, paying for it with homeowners dues and amenities fees, largely short-circuiting the municipal government process. Instead, it's really as close to an entirely privatized city as has ever been built in the U.S. Andrew Blechman, who wrote Leisureville, a fascinating 2008 book on The Villages and on retirement communities in general, had this to say about it:
Blechman says people are gladly trading a more diverse, complex environment for life with a simple, benign and powerful developer.
"Everything's owned by the developer," he says. "The government is owned by the developer. Everything's privatized — and they're happy with that. You know, they've traded in the ballot box for the corporate suggestion box."
There's also the level of the developers' control of the entire environment there, not just the built environment but the cultural and discursive environment too. It goes well beyond the usual deed restriction limits on what color you can paint your house or where you can park your boat. Since it's all essentially private space, there are practical limits on political speech, like candidates not being able to solicit door-to-door and being limited to making public appearances wherever the developers decide to allow them (and where the location choice tends to favor the developers' preferred candidates). And the residents' news largely gets filtered through the developer-owned media; the newspaper and the radio station are both owned by Morse, and focus primarily on inane human-interest stories, sprinkled occasionally with conservative editorializing.
In Leisureville, Blechman goes into detail about a county commission race where those problems proved to be impossible impediments for the non-preferred candidates who were running. Bear in mind, the non-preferred candidates, running in dark-red Sumter County, were still conservative Republicans; they were just people from the rural, non-Villages parts of the county, where they still have to worry about paying for, and finding the revenue to pay for, niceties like public schools and publicly-maintained roads. With The Villages making up a larger and larger proportion of the county, though, needless to say, the non-preferred candidates lost anyway.
So, if you look at Ryan's appearance at The Villages in the broader context, it doesn't really seem like he's boldly striding into the lion's den at all. Instead, it's an ideal place for him to go, as The Villages is really the Republican utopic vision, physically manifested. And that's not just because it's entirely elderly and white, a bizarro-world Logan's Run ... it's a place where the public sphere is all but eliminated, where private ownership will take care of you and make sure everything's easy for you, so long as you pay your fees and don't care too much about accountability or transparency. It's a place where "Hey, I got mine" is the motto, and where if you don't already got yours, there's no room for you.