Rep. Paul Ryan was in town last week, and he did a round of interviews on talk radio shows, hoping to find an audience hungry for his new book, which essentially explains how the Tea Party can grab actual control of things, instead of just throwing wrenches and, ultimately, losing again.
The book is called The Way Forward: Renewing The American Idea, and here's how Ryan, who was Mitt Romney's running mate, described it on KNUS' Kelley and Company Aug. 26:
RYAN (at 3 minutes): I believe it's not enough to criticize the direction the country is going. I believe it's more important to say what you would do differently. And the purpose [of his book] is to show a conservative movement that is capable of appealing to a majority of Americans. One of the lessons I learned from being on a presidential campaign where we didn't win the election is we have to win Congress to our cause. We have to show a conservative agenda and a conservative movement that is inclusive, that is appealing, that is aspirational, that's principled but is big enough to appeal to a majority of Americans, so that we can win national elections, so that we can win Senate races like Cory Gardner is undertaking. So that we can actually fix the country's problems. I believe we need to give the people of this nation a crystal-clear choice about what kind of country they actually want to have. And then if you win that kind of election, then you have the moral authority to actually make it so.
The funny thing about this statement is, no one would describe Ryan or Gardner, who's challenging Colorado's Sen. Mark Udall, as representative of the "inclusive" movement conservatives need to win. They're the problem with the Republican Party.
I mean, Ryan and Gardner didn't make any joint appearances in Denver for a reason: Democrats take every opportunity to spotlight Gardner's votes for a federal budget bill writted by Ryan. The so-called "Ryan budget" cuts deeply into Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and other popular programs, particularly affecting the poor, but everybody else as well.
Ryan's proposed cuts are so unpopular, if anyone hears about them, I'm surprised Gardner's name came out of Ryan's mouth at all--and, in turn, that Democrats didn't spin his utterance about Gardner as, Ryan Visits Denver and Endorses Gardner!
As for Gardner, his divisiveness goes beyond voting for the Ryan budget. Gardner likes to talk about the big fat need for Republican inclusiveness too, as he did with Fox 31 Denver's Eli Stokols after the big fat 2012 election loss, saying how much the GOP needs women and hispanics.
But it wasn't long after the 2012 election loss that Gardner went back to DC and added his name to the list of sponsors of the federal personhood bill, continuing his long-standing and hard-line opposition to abortion, even for rape and incest.
And of course Gardner helped block immigration reform, continuing his past pattern, even opposing the House Speaker John Boehner's puny effort to promote broad principles that might fly with the Tea Party.
Now, Gardner's trying to backpedal, breaking out the whitewash, as the left-leaning blog ColoradoPols explained Friday, and talking about how inclusive he is.
And Ryan sounds just like Gardner, except tif you listen to him trying to sell books on conservative talk radio, Ryan is using less whitewash, because he's not running for vice president anymore--or for Senate in Colorado.