CT Blue

Sometimes it amazes me. The New York Times has an op-ed columnist with a Nobel Prize in Economics, but it appears no one at the Times reads his columns. How else to explain that someone let a Republican (Max Boot) write an op-ed piece claiming that the Republican Party has only recently become the actual party of stupid, as opposed to the party that was only pretending to be the party of stupid.

I won’t dissect the whole thing, in which he claims that Ronald Reagan, for instance, was really an intellectual playing the part of a stupid person. Let’s just concentrate fire on this particular paragraph:

There are still some thoughtful Republican leaders exemplified by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party. But the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.

As Krugman has noted time and again, Ryan is not an intellectual paragon, and his “impressive new budget plan” is a total fraud. Just one example, written before Ryan’s descent to the Speaker’s chair:

But Ryan didn’t step into that role by actually being a serious, honest conservative; he just played one on TV. If you knew anything at all about budgeting, you soon realized that his supposedly responsible fiscal proposals were stuffed full of mystery meat. He knew how to game the system, creating the impression that CBO had vetted his plans when it had done no such thing (and in fact hinted broadly that the whole thing was a crock). But there’s never been any indication that he actually knows how to produce a budget — and in any case, giant tax cuts for the rich and fiscal responsibility are fundamentally incompatible.

So Ryan’s current stature is really quite curious, and I’d argue quite fragile. He has been a highly successful con artist, pretending to be the reasonable conservative centrists desperately want to see; he has become a power within his party because of that external achievement. But he’s not a true hero of the crazy right; he’s valued mainly because of his successful con job on the center. So he doesn’t have a reserve of goodwill from the crazies that would let him be, well, not crazy. On the other hand, if he were to be the kind of speaker the crazies want, he would undermine that all-important centrist approbation. Being off to the side, pretending to be dealing thoughtfully with important policy issues, was where he needed to be; moving to the speaker’s chair would be a lose-lose proposition.

Time and again people who can add and subtract (see one of Dean Baker’s takedowns here) have pointed out that Ryan’s budgets don’t add up, but Mr. Boot has apparently bought into the myth that Krugman has tried so hard to expose. He can believe what he wants, but it’s really time for the Times to stop reinforcing the Ryan mythology.