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Individual Blog Post From Tom Weiss
Retired Lieutenant Colonel with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've written non-fiction for professional journals. It drives me nuts when people think Jethro Tull is just a person in the band.Contact me at [email protected]
Wednesday, November 12th 2014
Posted Wed Nov 12 2014 17:25
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I don't have much to say about last week's election that hasn't already been said by people much smarter and more literate than myself. It's a step in the right direction and a Republican congress should help to frame the 2016 debate. Nothing of note will likely be accomplished in the next two years, which is just fine by me. Washington needs to do less, not more.
After every election - especially a "wave" election - pundits throw around theories trying to explain why a party won or lost, and eventually one of those theories becomes "conventional wisdom." Like betting the Minnesota Vikings to lose the Superbowl, it's a metaphysical certainty that this "conventional wisdom" will be wrong, but pundits have to say something to get paid.
Interested in what progressives were saying about the defeat - what will eventually become "conventional wisdom" - I looked to Paul Krugman's column in the pages of the New York Times. He's a smart economist - he has a Nobel Prize after all - but first and foremost he is a liberal progressive.
On just about any political issue, if I'm on the opposite side of Paul Krugman I feel pretty good. So when he opens his column with this, "politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth," I feel pretty certain we have the truth on our side.
Krugman goes on to take a shot at Paul Ryan: "I suspect that some pundits will shade their analysis to reflect the new balance of power - for example by once again pretending that Representative Paul Ryan's budget proposals are good-faith attempts to put America's fiscal house in order, rather than exercises in deception and double-talk."
Quick Paul Ryan story: I had dinner with him in early 2007 in Baghdad. I had no idea who he was at the time, but my boss was looking for people to sit down with members of a Congressional delegation in country to check out the progress of 'The Surge.' I saw a congressman from Wisconsin on the list and signed up because I grew up in the state and my parents live there.
There were four of us at the table: myself, a female soldier, Representative Ryan and a SOF operator that Ryan knew from school (if memory serves). The two spent most of the dinner reminiscing and at one point Ryan said something to the effect of "Wow, I haven't done much since school but look at you!"
At the end of the dinner Ryan asked each of us if there was anyone back home he could call upon his return and let them know we were doing ok. I wrote down my mother's name and phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to him, confident that he would hand it to a staffer who may or may not actually call my mother when they returned to the US.
To my surprise, my mother sent me an excited note a few days later explaining that Ryan himself had called and talked to her for about 10 minutes. I was impressed - he was a man of humility who kept his promises.
Of course this anecdote says nothing about Ryan's budget proposals, but I have a hard time seeing the man who called my mother staking his political career on "deception and double-talk." I wonder if Krugman has ever had dinner with Paul Ryan...
Krugman moves on to expound on how wrong the right has been "about, well, everything." From economic policy to government spending (where he cites himself using data he doesn't explain how to replicate) to Obamacare to climate change, "the most important wrongness of all," Krugman explains how Republicans are idiots who were only able to get elected by lying about their true positions.
Please, please, please let this become the "conventional wisdom." I don't want liberal progressives like Krugman to change one iota - just keep doing what you're doing Paul. My most fervent wish is that Democratic strategists and pollsters read this column and think to themselves, "Yeah, that's exactly what we need for 2016."
As a result, I'm christening his analysis "The Best Election Commentary of the Season." It's an honorary award, but it goes to the "Man of Understanding" who has nailed it. I look forward to much more insightful analysis along these lines in the years to come.