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Wisconsin Interest magazine profiles Paul Ryan.
Ryan has become the ultimate political oxymoron – a Republican national media darling. To conservatives, this is akin to seeing Sasquatch roller skating down the street smoking a pipe. It simply doesn’t happen.
And yet there is Paul Ryan, on a CNBC panel out-nerding all the high-paid TV financial analysts. And there is Paul Ryan on the Sunday network talk shows explaining how America is in the midst of a slow-motion federal entitlement catastrophe. And there is Paul Ryan dismantling the health care bill at President Obama’s sham “summit,” while the president glares at him as if Ryan just told the Obama kids there’s no tooth fairy.
Ryan is a throwback; he could easily have been a conservative politician in the era before cable news. He has risen to national stardom by taking the path least traveled by modern politicians: He knows a lot of stuff.
Few members of Congress have attained Ryan’s mind-boggling velocity. Elected to Congress in 1998 at the tender age of 28, he is on everyone’s watch list. Fortune has anointed Ryan as President Obama’s foremost adversary. Conservative patriarch George Will has Ryan all but penciled in as the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012. America’s Cougar-in-Chief, Sarah Palin, listed Ryan as her favorite presidential candidate in 2012. The London Daily Telegraph ranked Ryan as America’s ninth most influential conservative, ahead of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
In fact, rarely does Wisconsin’s fiscal dreamboat give an interview these days when he’s not asked if he’s running for president in 2012; he steadfastly maintains that he will not. But why are people so suddenly so excited by a congressman from Janesville, Wisconsin? In other words…
What’s so damn special about Paul Ryan? …
David Harsanyi says we don’t want any more help.
… At a Minnesota town hall, for instance, the president offered this gem: “You can’t just make money on SUVs and trucks. There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market.”
If only the common man had such insight into markets. Earlier this month, Ford reported that sport utility vehicle sales had increased 31 percent (car sales improved 3.4 percent) from a year earlier. General Motors also “bounced back” on the strength of its worldwide SUV sales. Who knows? If this administration didn’t harbor resentment toward useful and affordable energy, Ford could sell even more SUVs.
Just an example.
Now, considering the failure of Washington to help shake off this prolonged slump, it is no surprise that a recent Washington Post poll found that 73 percent of Americans — up from 52 percent last year and 41 percent a decade ago — doubt the ability of government to solve the nation’s economic problems.
I suppose it’s not surprising that this administration refuses to budge a single food stamp away from its faith-based beliefs. But if it really wanted to help, it would stop “helping.”
Andrew Malcolm says, “On Day 938 of his presidency, Obama says he’ll have a jobs plan in a month or so.”
… At his speaking engagements, Obama stressed the need to extend payroll tax cuts and to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and other union-made infrastructure kinds of stuff. Also some free-trade agreements. This was a repetition of what he had said on the first day of his Grand Ground Tour.
On his 938th day in office President Obama also said he would soon have a completed jobs plan. Maybe early fall, something like that. And he complained, “We could do even more if Congress is willing to get in the game.”
Tomorrow with all this heavy work in his rear-view mirror, the president is scheduled to join his family on Martha’s Vineyard for a nine-day vacation.
Kathleen Parker doesn’t like the bus. You know, the one made in Canada.
About that bus: What could the White House have been thinking?
Here the country is reeling from depression, recession and oppression, and the president decides to take a heartland tour in the visual equivalent of an armored hearse?
David Boaz tries to answer the question whether Obama is worse than Carter and Bush.
Conservatives have become so furious with President Obama that they forget just how bad some of his predecessors were. One Jeffrey Kuhner, whose over-the-top op-eds in the Washington Times belie the sober and judicious conservatism you might expect from the president of the “Edmund Burke Institute,” writes most recently:
“A possible Great Depression haunts the land. Primarily one man is to blame: President Obama.
Mr. Obama has racked up more than $4 trillion in debt.”
Yes, he has. And that’s almost as much as the $5 trillion in debt rung up by his predecessor, George W. Bush. True, on an annual basis Obama is leaving Bush in the dust. But acceleration has been the name of the game: In 190 years, 39 presidents racked up a trillion dollars in debt. The next three presidents ran the debt up to about $5.73 trillion. Then Bush 43 almost doubled the total public debt, to $10.7 trillion, in eight years. And now the 44th president has added almost $4 trillion in two years and seven months. …
For those who think the president will be Harry S, Obama, Michael Barone has a history lesson.
… Truman’s victory was due to two “F factors” — the farm vote and foreign policy — the first of which scarcely exists today and the second of which seems unlikely to benefit Obama in the same way.
When the nation went to war in the 1940s one out of four Americans still lived on farms. The 1948 electorate still reflected that America. Voter turnout was actually lower than it was in 1940, and the vast postwar demographic changes were not reflected in elections until turnout surged in the contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson in 1952.
Truman promised to keep Depression-era farm subsidies in place and charged that Dewey and the Republicans would repeal them. That enabled him to run ahead of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 showing in 13 states with large farm populations from Indiana to Colorado and Minnesota to Oklahoma.
Without that swing in the farm vote Truman would not have won. Dewey, waking up to find that he would not be president as he and almost everyone expected, spotted that immediately the morning after the election.
Today only 2 to 3 percent of Americans live on farms. Farm prices are currently running far ahead of subsidy prices. Obama is not going to be re-elected by the farm vote.
The second F factor that helped Truman was foreign policy. As Ornstein correctly notes, Truman’s Cold War policies — the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan — were supported by Republican congressional leaders and by Dewey. Top Dewey advisers were taken into confidence by Truman’s foreign policy appointees. It was the golden era of bipartisan foreign policy.
But on one policy Truman went further than his top advisers or Dewey’s. When the Soviets blocked land access to West Berlin in June 1948, Truman’s advisers — men of the caliber of George Marshall and Omar Bradley — said that it was impossible to supply food and fuel to Berlin and we should just abandon it.
At a crucial meeting in July 1948 Truman listened to this advice. After others finished talking, Truman said simply, “We’re not leaving Berlin.” …
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the many “seasons” stores use to focus on customers needs. The article is strange in that it moves from suggesting retailers spend their time trying to manipulate behavior to one more with more benign motives. Whatever your take, you’ll learn something about retailers’ efforts.
… In a suburb of Minneapolis, Supervalu runs a “lab store,” a model store not open to the public where the third-largest traditional grocery store company in the U.S. can test how new products look on its shelves and experiment with seasonal displays. Last month, Supervalu employees worked to create the perfect fall endcap, the shelves that anchor the end of the typical grocery store aisle. The goal—easy meals for parents pressed for time at the start of the school year.
Problems quickly became apparent. After setting up tuna in pouches, mayonnaise, peanut butter and bread on the lunch endcap, employees saw that the tuna pouches tilted slightly backwards. The tuna “didn’t present itself well to customers,” says Chris Doeing, a director of merchandising for Supervalu, which owns chains including Albertsons and Cub Foods. Tuna was booted from the endcap to a nearby shelf.
On endcaps, best-selling items often go on the larger shelves near the floor to grab people’s attention from farther away. Employees experiment with which size and shape products look best together. …