John Nichols was saying just now in an extended interview that John Boehner isn’t leading his caucus. And that’s one of the reasons (there are several more) that he’s confusing and …confused. He’s been babbling on about deficit-cutting options but making no sense.
Part of the problem, says Nichols, is that Paul Ryan believes his, um, service as vice-presidential candidate should elevate him to at least the role of Speaker. Boehner’s inability to lead his disagreeable,squabbling, fellow-Republican House members isn’t helping his reputation.
Erick Erickson noted a couple of weeks ago:
House Republicans are being badly served by John Boehner.
Paul Ryan managed to get through a brutal Presidential campaign with higher favorables than the incumbent Vice President, saw senior citizens actually gravitate to him instead of runaway from him and his proposals, and Paul Ryan is actually speaking up defending conservative values, ideals, and principles while John Boehner is trying to muddy them and compromise them away.
House Republicans should think very carefully if the faux-tanned face of John Boehner is the face they want for their party in the next two years. They should consider Paul Ryan as their Speaker. ...Red State
Personally I’d love to see Ryan take the role. He’s a lousy communicator, and he is (as Paul Krugman has certified*) a con man. Those qualities surely put him in a league with Boehner and ol’ Mitch McConnell, don’t they?
Boehner could then go and lie on a beach and get an authentic tan…
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*His plan never added up; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.
His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see. …Krugman
Cross posted from Prairie Weather
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