The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack spent the last week in southeast Wisconsin covering the second half of the series of town halls Rep. Paul Ryan had. His write-up of them is a must-read. I’ll give you two tastes of the write-up; an illustration of just how much of a failure the Democrat trackers were, and the answer to the Presidential portion of the “2012 question”:
Despite having a Democratic party tracker and Center for American Progress Action Fund blogger covering Ryan’s town halls, all they have out of 19 hours of footage are a few clips of Ryan getting booed. They have a video of a constituent yelling “liar!” at Ryan. What they do not have is video of Ryan actually lying or getting stumped by a question. Liberals might not agree with him, but Ryan had a persuasive answer, filled with facts and figures, to every question he was asked.
Take, for example, the video clip that showed Ryan getting booed for saying “we do tax the top.” He typically goes on to argue that a 35% corporate tax hurts small businesses who have to compete with foreign competitors with much lower tax rates, while some big corporations like GE pay no taxes at all because of loopholes, tax shelters, and deductions. The solution, Ryan says, is clean out “the junk” in the tax code, and then “lower tax rates for everybody” while keeping tax revenues where they are today. A similar idea was endorsed by President Obama’s fiscal commission, and the Ways and Means committee will hammer out the details of which deductions they want to nix or reduce this summer….
If Ryan can defend the Ryan plan better than anyone else, shouldn’t he be the one to debate the president about it in 2012? Shouldn’t he consider running for president if no viable candidate emerges to champion real Medicare reform?
“I’m not even going there,” Ryan told me on Wednesday. “I’m not even going there with my mind or my discussions.… I have no doubt somebody who’s running for president sees the true nature of our fiscal condition, they’ll come to the similar conclusions about how best to fix it, if they’re a conservative.”
Whether you managed to make one of Ryan’s town halls or not, I recommend you read it.
