GOP Follows Historical Precedent

Frank Rich: Surprise! Mitt As Robotic As Thought -- Daily Intelligencer

...The House GOP still doesn’t know that Obama won the election. This includes Paul Ryan, who is like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept on fighting on a remote atoll years after V-J Day, refusing to believe that his army had been defeated. What’s fascinating about the new Ryan budget is that it restates all the planks that failed to move voters when he was on the Republican ticket: repealing Obamacare, vouchering Medicare, cutting taxes for the wealthy, ending the Medicaid expansion (now already being lapped up by Republican as well as Democratic governors), and vowing to close tax loopholes that still remain mysteriously unidentified. Ryan explains this consistency by saying that to compromise on any of this means that he would “surrender our principles.” As I’ve written, the GOP is not going to move to the center after its 2012 defeat any more than it did after Barry Goldwater’s 1964 landslide loss to LBJ. It may even move further right, with each new Ryan budget being “the worst...”