Will Political Winds Backlash Into Perfect Storm?

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What a difference a change in ownership can make. One of the things the Janesville Messenger used to do well in the past was with their local election stories and coverage. They were usually written with a neutral bias, in sort of a “I write ‘em as I sees ‘em – you decide” kind of way. Those days are over.

Sunday’s Janesville Messenger front page story titled, “Ryan’s challengers face uphill battle” contained several passages that were heavily weighted against his challengers and glossed over Ryan’s record of party-line votes with opinions from biased observers.

JM Excerpt:
“I see little dissatisfaction with Rep. Ryan……….Second, unless there is an amazing backlash to the stock market plunge (Tuesday) that outweighs the backlash from the Republican House vote against the current plan, Republicans in the House probably are on the right side of the public." -- observer

You know he's not talking about Democrats here. Presumably, this article was written before the bill eventually passed. But on Tuesday, the majority of House Republicans voted against the bill and were on the public’s side – except Ryan……he voted for it. So, Ryan is not representative of that "right side of the public" group. Secondly, once Ryan dropped his purported free-market principles, with or without the addition of capital gains tax cuts or earmarks, his position on the bill was to tow the GOP house party-line which was for the bail-out.

Folkbum Excerpt:
It's simple, really: Paul Ryan voted for this bill because John Boehner told him to.

When a majority of republican’s voted against the bill, they also voted against GOP house leadership. This exposed a deep fracture within the party. But not Ryan, he boldly tows the party-line. Throw in his propensity towards Wall Street and there was no way Ryan would vote against this bail-out bill. Principles and constituents be damned.

On top of it all, Republicans complained it was the Democrats who lacked leadership and blamed them for the failed bail out. Never mind that 2/3 of democrats voted for the bill.

The article, and this was not an op-ed, also conjectured about Ryan’s future in government by purposely placing his skill set above his duties and abilities as representative while implying that his challengers are not his equals.

JM Excerpt:
So good, in fact, that political observers regard the 38-year-old as one of the party's rising stars.

So good – in fact? The key here of course is Ryan is “one of his party’s rising stars.” I won’t deny that, and you too would be a star if you towed the “party-line” 90% of the time and pushed the party’s ideology in bills and policy. Constituents? Why…. those are the political winds.

It comes down to this. If we don’t like where things have been headed for the past ten years, why in the world would anyone vote for the same party policies, principles and partisans that got us to where we are today, more so particularly, that party's rising stars?