At first glance, Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan is the ideal Republican candidate – a young intellectual leader with plenty of legislative experience who also happens to be in terrific shape.
Ryan credits his fitness to the notorious P90X routine, which emphasizes the concept of “muscle confusion” to continually change up exercises and keep the body guessing, according to its website.
The problem is this scattershot philosophy of exercise has carried over to Ryan’s political actions – his congressional voting record shows how inconsistent his beliefs are. Ryan shows all the classic symptoms of clinical “voting confusion.” Alternating chin-ups, yoga and bicep curls might do wonders for his physique, but if Ryan’s policies aren’t consistent, America will be worse off for it.
Ryan is routinely portrayed as a leading Republican theorist, a Reagan-esque supply-side adherent with hints of libertarianism. This is mainly due to his famous deficit-reducing budget plan and professed love for the writings of Ayn Rand.
But Ryan’s voting record shows a history of fiscal irresponsibility – alarming for the man who is supposed to save our economy.
In the Bush years, Ryan fell in line with other Republicans, routinely voting for bloated expenditures and debt ceiling increases. As a congressman in 2003, Ryan voted for a Medicare expansion for a prescription drug benefit, which in 2014 will have cost more than $500 billion, according to a Los Angeles Times study.
For all his flexing and posturing, it’s painfully obvious Ryan is pretending to be something he’s not.
He is one of the big-spending, irresponsible neoconservatives who already had eight years to run our country into the ground, hiding behind a budget plan that flatters to deceive. He’s the chubby kid wearing a T-shirt in the neighborhood pool – which might explain why all his suits look like he borrowed them from Chris Christie.
Ryan’s budget plan, whether you agree with it or not, certainly takes some bold steps to reduce federal spending. In a drastic turnaround from his 2003 vote, Ryan proposed cutting Medicare benefits by about $700 billion over the next decade, according to analysis by Politifact.com.
But for someone who claims to be so passionate about frugality, Ryan has one enormous blind spot: the defense budget. The United States spends far more on its military than any other world power, but Ryan has repeatedly refused to make substantial cuts to this area of spending.
In recent years, many experts have recommended that Pentagon spending be scaled down, including officials from the Pentagon itself. So what was Ryan’s excuse for shooting down $500 billion in budget cuts that top generals said could be safely made?
He just didn’t believe them.
“We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice. We don’t think the generals believe their budget is truly the right budget,” Ryan said of the proposed cuts at a budget discussion forum earlier this year.
Maybe Ryan is just confused again, and this time forgot whose side he’s supposed to be on.
But since Ryan apparently knows what the military wants – even if they don’t – I suspect we’ll see some truly revolutionary defense ideas from him should he find his way into the vice presidency.
If the Pentagon were to revamp its training program and replace the current system with the P90X routine, each soldier could be trained for just three easy payments of $39.95 (plus shipping and handling).
Surely even the most hawkish of Ryan’s sensibilities can’t object to that. It fits right into his preferred model of cutting federal spending, giving money to private companies and letting everyone else pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
With a man of Ryan’s record in the second-highest office in the nation, it’s impossible to tell what’s coming. The only sure thing is if voters expect him to be the man he claims to be, there will be a lot more confusion coming.
Gordon Brillon is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Lincoln, R.I.
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Contact Gordon Brillon at [email protected]; Twitter: @TDR_gbrillon