John McCormack
The Weekly Standard
4/30/2011
Did you hear the news? Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, the architect of the House Republicans’ budget, was booed! By his own constituents!
The video of said town hall booing was clipped by the liberal blog ThinkProgress, zipped around the Internet, and then moved up the conveyor belt to CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NBC’s Nightly News, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and other media outlets.
And so the “budget backlash” narrative began…
…The only problem with the backlash narrative is that it is wildly misleading. Despite efforts by labor unions and a variety of liberal activist organizations—One Wisconsin Now, MoveOn.org, Citizens Action of Wisconsin, Community for Change, etc.—to pack Ryan’s events with detractors and hecklers, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by his supporters.
At the 19 town hall meetings held over the course of two weeks, Ryan was praised much more frequently than he was heckled by attendees. Judging from applause versus boos this week, I didn’t witness a single event where Ryan had less than two-thirds of the crowd supporting him. Some constituents thanked Ryan for his “moral courage.”…
…On April 28, Ryan faced one of the more hostile crowds of the week in the city of Greenfield, just outside of Milwaukee. About 600 people packed into a high school auditorium, and hecklers tried to interrupt him every five to ten minutes. Toward the end of the Q&A session, a woman began her question by thanking Ryan for producing his budget. Then the previously silent super-majority in the crowd began to applaud and rose to their feet.
Ryan received another standing ovation in Racine on Friday, but that detail was left out of Politico‘s story. “Rep. Paul Ryan had local police remove a man from his town hall meeting Friday after he kept yelling about how Ryan’s budget plan would impact Medicare,” Politico reported from Racine. “It was the most dramatic moment yet in Ryan’s weeklong series of town halls, and it happened in one of the most Democratic areas of his district.”
Well, that’s a matter of opinion.
Was one man being escorted from a town hall meeting the “most dramatic moment” of the week? Or was it more dramatic when hundreds of senior citizens gave not one but two standing ovations to a politician proposing a bold Medicare reform? Again, it’s a matter of opinion. But the latter moment is a far more accurate depiction of what Ryan actually faced in his swing district these last two weeks….
Read the complete article at The Weekly Standard.
H/T Power Line
Update: This morning Congressman Ryan was on ABC’s This Week. Cubachi has the video, “What I care about is fixing this country and getting this debt situation under control.”
