Budgeting is all about priorities. Congress chooses which programs to preserve and which to diminish or dismantle. Congress also chooses whether to cover the costs by asking more from those who can afford to pay or to do so by shifting the burden to those most in need. The American people get this. And they want their leaders to respond to proposals to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by saying, "Yeah, we're not going to do that."
Cheney has been around politics long enough to understand this dynamic, not because he is a liberal, and not because he is disinclined toward schemes for redistributing the wealth upward. The man who did so much to privatize the military when he was in charge at the Pentagon would undoubtedly love to privatize some domestic programs, if he could see a politically palatable way to pull it off.
When the Bush-Cheney administration tried in its second term to restructure Social Security, the vice president loyally followed the script -- making statements that sounded themes familiar to Ryan -- until the initiative collapsed. But entitlement reform was never really the vice president's thing; in his biography he wrote of a time when "[e]ven I had to struggle to stay awake as I slogged through a speech on Medicare reform."
When there is no politically palatable option, Cheney's often been a "not-going-to-do-that" kind of guy. As a former secretary of defense in the mid-1990s, he entertained a 1996 presidential bid but then abandoned the project when no one seemed interested. Cheney recognized then, as he appeared to again in his 2001 "annoying mosquito" conversation with Ryan, that domestic political calculations require at least some deference to the wisdom of the American people.
Today that wisdom says that the United States need not, and must not, slash the social safety net in order to advance reforms that will be very good for Wall Street but very bad for Main Street. Until Paul Ryan accepts this reality, he will remain stuck on the same questions. Indeed, if the Republicans nominate the ambitious young congressman for president in 2016, and if he runs on the agenda Dick Cheney swatted away 15 years earlier, Ryan will again find himself asking, "Why did we lose? How did it happen? Why does the Republican Party seem to keep losing ground?"
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