Obama's call to culture war

By W.W. | IOWA CITY

PAUL RYAN, author of a controversial new Republican budget proposal, endorsed and actively campaigned with Mitt Romney in Wisconsin in the run-up to Mr Romney's primary victory there. On Tuesday, Mr Obama lashed out vehemently against Mr Ryan's budget proposal, calling it a "Trojan Horse" concealing "thinly veiled social Darwinism". Some commentators, impressed with Mr Obama's hysterical rhetoric, suggest that association with Mr Ryan will hurt Mr Romney's general-election chances. Here's John Heilemann of New York magazine:

Judging from Obama's speech yesterday, Romney-Ryan is the new Dole-Gingrich. Please recall that in 1996, Bill Clinton's campaign spent the spring hanging the controversial Speaker of the House around the septuagenarian senator's neck like a twenty-ton anvil—and in the process effectively won the general election six months early. Team Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, is confident that the same stratagem can work again. That they can win (and win decisively) the argument with the Republicans if they frame the election as a choice between the Ryan budget (and the philosophy animating it) and their vision of the fiscal future. The howling on the right over Obama's assault was not an unfortunate byproduct of the speech; it was the intended purpose. The president's people want to goad the Republicans into a posture of unified and feral support for Ryan, and thus yolk [sic] Romney to him ever more tightly. The sight of Ryan speaking at Romney's victory event in Wisconsin had tails wagging vigorously in Chicago; imagine a kennel at feeding time and you'll have a decent vision of what Obama's reelection HQ looked like last night.

David Axelrod, an election strategist for Mr Obama, confirms the adminstration's tactics:

“[Mr Romney has] very much lashed to Ryan and the House Republicans,” said David Axelrod, a top strategist for Mr. Obama. “They share an economic view and a view on the budget. By essentially embracing the framework of Ryan, Romney is also embracing the steps that would be necessary to implement it.”

Ezra Klein chimes in:

By lashing Romney to Ryan's budget, Obama intends to lash him to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Where Romney has purposefully refrained from filling in the details on his agenda, the Obama campaign intends to use Ryan's blueprint to fill them in on Romney's behalf.

Is all this "yoking" and "lashing" really so bad for Mr Romney? It's not so clear to me. Mr Heilemann describes Mr Obama's election team as a pack of happy dogs about to sup on raw Romney meat. As a habitue of dog parks, I find Mr Obama's incendiary language more akin to the posturing, threatened yap.

Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Mr Ryan is no Newt Gingrich. He is not a pompous, self-aggrandising bloviator in the grand southern style. He's a likeable, hardworking, detail-oriented, Midwestern wonk who just happens to be something of a looker. Moreover, Mr Ryan's conservatism largely eschews the odious cultural politics of social conservatives and focuses instead on a pragmatic, fiscally conservative market-oriented meliorism, the appeal of which is by no means limited to the hard right. He's an attractive politician offering an attractive comprehensive alternative to the administration's approach. And that's why it is a matter of urgent political necessity for Mr Obama to try to smear Mr Ryan's budget as a recipe for brutal, devil-take-the-hindmost injustice.

Indeed, the Ryan/Obama dialectic seems to me to represent a remarkable reversal of the usual pattern of American politics: Democrats offer serious, substantive policy proposal; Republicans respond with unhinged culture-war politics. This is not so surprising if one grasps that the Democrats are profoundly conservative about the New Deal/Great Society social-insurance state, upon which Obamacare is a sort of capstone. The New Deal is the modern Democratic Party's founding event, and the persistence of its institutions in their traditional mode is a matter of identity and meaning on the left as much as it is a matter of practical policy. I think that's why Democrats seem to relish linking Mr Romney's fate to Mr Ryan's. It offers Mr Obama and his supporters the chance to fight a culture war on their hallowed home ground. But should they be so sure they'll win?

Mr Ryan is ready and able to debate the substance of public policy in a way only a few members of congress, left or right, can match. He's become a de facto leader of the GOP not because he's a big idea man in the Gingrich mould, but rather because he's extraordinarily capable of approaching America's big-ticket structural problems with coherent, detailed policy proposals. After Mr Obama's Tuesday speech, Mr Ryan's office released a sharp, systematic rebuttal on Facebook. You don't have to agree with Mr Ryan's politics to see the substance here. Although he is at least Mr Ryan's equal as a debater and policy wonk, Mr Obama has not and will not win every fight he picks with him. Mr Obama seems to be gambling on the assumption he is safely encamped on the moral high ground, and can therefore lose a good few battles and nevertheless win the war.

It's a war I'd like to see. Mr Romney should proceed with his dalliance with Mr Ryan, and challenge Mr Obama not only on practical policy particulars, but to be bold and challenge his claim to the moral high ground. This may well be a hill Mr Romney is destined to die upon, as the baiting Democrats evidently believe. If so, it would be a glorious death. But if not—if he can manage to take the high ground—he'll have overturned much more than Obamacare.