Is Congressman Paul Ryan’s latest round of outreach to the poor driven by humility and charity, or a desire for good press?
I’m not a big fan of current member of Congress and 2012 Republican nominee for Vice President Paul Ryan’s politics. But I do have to give him credit where credit is due. Few other politicians are as good at selling themselves to gullible reporters as he is.
Jonathan Chait brought this up again the other day after it leaked out that a documentary film will be coming out soon highlighting Paul Ryan doing dishes in soup kitchens and talking to poor people, something that Ryan has long claimed he isn’t doing for publicity. Now I suppose it’s possible that Ryan is doing these good deeds out of Christian love or because he’s just a nice guy, but lots of people work in soup kitchens and they don’t all have documentary films made about how great they are. That fact might be telling us something too.
Either way trying to get inside the heads of politicians to figure out what they “really” think is pretty much always a fools errand. As Chait puts it:
Ultimately Ryan’s motives are beside the point. Human motivation is difficult to discern. Even people who act in the crassest self-interest are capable of deluding themselves into believing in their own virtue. Ryan surely believes that he is doing good for the world, precisely because he is an ideologue. What’s so unusual about Ryan is his ability to do things that would be held up as evidence of ambition or political motive by most politicians, but are presented as the opposite when done by him.
But this is also why the primary evidence for analyzing Ryan should not be his own testimony about his motives, nor his visits to bookstores, or other performative gestures in full view of the media, but his actual policy agenda. Ryan has massive influence over his party’s budget. Through a combination of ideological commitments and political constraints, Ryan’s budget proposes to reduce taxes for the rich, increase defense spending, leave retirement benefits for everybody over the age of 55 untouched, and eliminate the budget deficit. This combination requires massive cuts to programs targeted to the poor. Whether Ryan’s plan to impose massive cuts to aid for poor people reflects a contempt for the poor, a belief the poor will be better off with less aid, or simply caring less about the poor than other budgetary priorities is impossible to know.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free
This is exactly right. One of political journalists’ most annoying habits is their tendency to rely on anecdotes and personal interactions to try and ascertain what politicians “really think.” But there’s no reason that assume that some political journalist from Yahoo (or anywhere else) is any better at figuring out what someone believes from personal interactions than anyone else. If we are going to trust these sorts of “character studies” we might as well just pick leaders by drawing names out of a hat, or use the old “who-I’d-rather-have-a-beer-with” test that served us so well in 2000.
I think it’s great that Ryan is taking time out of his busy schedule to scrub some pots, and I suppose it’s possible that he really does want to help poor Americans. But that still doesn’t change the point that Ryan has consistently advocated for policies that would take from the poor in order to benefit the very wealthiest Americans. And that tells us more about Ryan and his beliefs than any soup kitchen anecdote ever can.
Like The Good Men Project On Facebook
Photo by Mary Altaffer/AP
Maybe you can do an article about President Obama’s fiscal year 2016 budget eliminates all funding for the Centers for Disease Control prostate cancer program. LOL, and there’s a war on women? But he didn’t stop there .. DALLAS — February 05, 2015 — Susan G. Komen® today praised proposed budget increases for cancer research in President Obama’s FY16 federal budget, but expressed strong concern about other proposed cuts that could limit access to breast screenings for low-income, uninsured or under-insured women. The president’s budget calls for increased funding of approximately 3.3 percent for the National Institutes of Health (NIH),… Read more »
You could just as easily ask whether Democrats who advocate social spending really care about the poor, or whether they’re just buying votes.
Democrats nowadays don’t care about the poor so your argument is null and void.
Asking why a politician does something and what they are trying to do are two different questions. Why did LBJ support civil rights? Because he wanted to make black people equal to white people, or because he wanted to gain black votes in the North, or because he was selfish and believed that by doing so he would gain the reputation of another Lincoln? Even historian it’s not clear, indeed all three answers might true at the same time. But on one level it doesn’t really matter, it’s what he did that counts. I don’t know why Ryan wants to… Read more »