Paul Ryan isn't letting go of his Obama-ignored-the-deficit-commission talking point. Here's his interview with Politico's Mike Allen.
Ryan: President Obama, through an executive order, created his own commission to solve this plan.
Q: You were on it.
Ryan: I was on the commission. And you know what he did? He didn't accept -- he didn't take one of the big recommendations of the commission, he basically disavowed the commission. And now, after the commission said we have an economic ruin on our hands, he put out a budget that said, that Erskine Bowles, the Democrat-appointed chairman of the commission says, doesn't go anywhere near where we have to go to solve our fiscal nightmare.
Q: So, do you think the commission was worth having?
Ryan: I thought it was great worth having [sic]. I thought it advanced an adult conversation that we needed to have. But the president just took us a few steps backwards by ignoring the commissions' findings, by ignoring its conclusions. It was mostly Democrats on the commission, which came from his point of view, and [shaking head] he didn't even take the recommendations.
You know what a good follow-up question would be? "So, Paul Ryan you voted against the commission's proposals! How can you attack Obama for failing to endorse policies you voted against?"
Here was Allen's actual follow up question:
Q: Mr. Chairman, you've been talking about entitlements about as long as I've known you. Based on the outreach you've gotten from the the White House in the past, how sincere do you think their current comments about this are?
Guess what? Ryan decided the White House isn't very sincere.
In many ways, this interview was very typical of Ryan's fawning press coverage. The reporter took as a given Ryan's premises that the national debt is our greatest crisis, that "leadership" is synonymous with cutting entitlement programs (and that raising taxes is not "leadership," and that the Bowles-Simpson commission represents the epitome of sound public policy. Now, I disagree with all these premises, but put that aside.
Even by these premises, which are often accepted uncritically within the media, Ryan is not a fiscal hawk. He voted for George W. Bush's 100% debt-financed Medicare expansion. He voted against the Bowles-Simpson plan. Isn't his authority on these issues just a wee bit suspect? Why do the media not only fail to question his sincerity at all, but give him an uncritical platform to question the sincerity of others? It's bizarre.