Tellingly, Klein refers to “Ryan’s unusual ideology.” Unusual? Does Klein mean to suggest that not spending trillions that we don’t have is “unusual”? Does he mean that how America has worked for most of its history — and pretty well, thank you — is “unusual” now that it’s 2013? That notions of community doing things that government should not are “unusual”? I wonder. And what should we make of that “ideology” word? This dismissal is particularly telling, not because Ryan isn’t ideological — he is — but because so is Ezra Klein. So is everyone. Anyone who privileges one value over another (liberty over security, or growth over redistribution, for example) is an ideologue. Anybody who believes in any individual right whatsoever is an ideologue. Anyone who believes in any form of equality is an ideologue. Klein’s reaction betrays an arrogant, rotten worldview — widely shared among his ilk. Are we really expected to buy that doing the opposite of Ryan’s plan isn’t “ideological”? That there’s no ideology behind the status quo? That there’s nothing but reason behind what Klein and his acolytes wish would happen? That Klein’s desired path for America is based on pure analysis?
This conceit of the Left should be based at every opportunity. If there was a non-ideological pragmatic candidate in the last election, it sure wasn’t Barack Obama. Mitt Romney filled that bill much more, which was one of his problems, in fact.
Their convictions are sincere, the product of each man’s upbringing and early life experience. Mr. Obama’s formative years spent as a community organizer inspired him to consider the poor or unemployed as abused by businesses that shuttered plants or raised rents – victims of an indifferent society. His decision to “organize black folks” as he explains in “Dreams from My Father,” was fed by a need to find his place in the civil rights movement, to prove himself “not alone in my particular struggles.”
Those struggles include uneasiness with being black. When in Kenya, he finally experiences the “freedom that comes from not feeling watched…here the world was black, and so you…could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.” His views of the United States and of Europe are tinged by antipathy to white colonialism. During his visit to Kenya he decides the white tourists are “an encroachment”; he resents that they exhibit “a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.” Obama carries baggage.
Rubio grew up listening to his polio-stricken grandfather extol the virtues and values of the United States. Rubio recalls that like so many proud immigrants, the old man impressed upon his grandson that “there was no limit to how far I could go, because I was an American.” While Obama’s upbringing causes him to focus on America’s “darker periods,” Rubio’s relationship with his native land is celebratory. Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama declines to proclaim America’s exceptionalism while Rubio shouts it from the rooftops.