Following Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the American electorate is trying to take his measure. But what yardstick to use? This seven-term representative from Wisconsin is best known for the controversial “Ryan Budgets,” but as his voting record from the Bush years is gaining scrutiny, his political orientation is causing confusion.

On the one hand, we have his speech accepting Romney’s invitation to be his running mate stating: “We won’t replace our founding principles … we will reapply them!” But what principles—the consistent support he gave the Bush administration for eight years or the consistent opposition he showed for the same programs when President Obama introduced them?

For someone with the stamina to look through the C-SPAN archives, it may come as a surprise that Paul Ryan has made a 180-degree turn in his positions on such economic issues as the value of stimulus spending to revitalize a sagging economy.

“Ryan has denounced the 2009 Recovery Act signed by President Obama as ‘a wasteful spending spree’ and ‘failed neo-Keynesian experiment,’ and—as The Huffington Post pointed out dismissed as ‘sugar-high economics’ the idea that government spending, through measures like payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, can help shore up a faltering economy.

“But in 2002, when then-President Bush was seeking a roughly $120 billion package of tax cuts, tax incentives for business and unemployment benefits to jump-start the economy, Ryan offered a vigorous defense of the plan. ‘What we’re trying to accomplish today with the passage of this third stimulus package is to create jobs and help the unemployed,’ Ryan said in video that aired on Up w/Chris Hayes. The remarks came during a House debate on the measure on Feb. 14, 2002.”

Ryan’s consistent support of “big government” during the Bush administration is nothing short of “marvelous,” to use a Romney expression.

Ryan’s popularity may have something to do with his readiness to obtain perks for his constituents. Back home, he explained his support for the Bush stimulus bill: “You have to spend a little to grow a little,” Ryan told constituents at a town hall in Wisconsin in January 2002, according to the Journal-Times, a local newspaper. “What we’re trying to do is stimulate that part of the economy that’s on its back.”

This and a number of other blatant turn arounds in his philosophy and voting record make Mitt Romney’s well-publicized “flip-flops” look like small change. And people who are aware of his switcheroos have a deep wonderment about the reasons behind them. “According to the Wisconsin Republican Liberty Caucus, the Wisconsin congressman actually voted with the Bush Administration’s agenda of unprecedented federal expansion 94% of the time, and it may surprise his fiscally conservative fans to know that Paul Ryan’s voting record includes votes for the TARP bailouts, the auto bailouts, the massive Bush Medicare expansion, the unprecedented federal intrusion into public education via No Child Left Behind, the 2008 stimulus package, and the $192B 2009 stimulus package.”

The question now is what the public is going to do as information leaks out and it dawns on his conservative supporters the extent to which Ryan’s early record is at odds with his current positions—and those of Mitt Romney. Even now he may be crafting—with the help of Romney’s advisors—a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion story with a dash of excusable youthful naiveté thrown in. But it’s going to be a hard dose to take. After all, Romney’s greatest incentive to pick Ryan was his appeal to the conservative base. Are they going to swallow it?

All of this may account for the fact that Romney’s announcement of his vice presidential choice isn’t giving him much of a “bump” in the polls. And, looking ahead to any debates between the candidates, it will be interesting to see what use Obama and Biden make of this compromising history. Could this be another example of a presidential candidate failing to properly “vet” a running mate?

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Ignorance is a choice: Money is power—Knowledge is more powerful.
What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

When I consider the track record of the 112th Congress, I am genuinely puzzled. Why can’t they see the big picture and work through their partisan differences to accomplish the common good? Why don’t they get that we sent them to Congress to work for us? I know the lobbyists pay them more, but when they were soliciting our votes—promises were made to us. And perhaps the biggest question of all is, what happens to the men and women we send to Congress between the time they win an election and the time they begin to get established and become part of the legislative “system”?

Out of charity, one assumes that a person seeking national office wants to fix problems that beset our nation. An office seeker generally has succeeded at some type of career, giving them credibility as to basic intelligence and ability—Christine O’Donnell’s run for a Senate seat aside. It is understandable how an outsider could see the dysfunction in Congress and assume that he or she could make a difference. And that is a laudable motivation.

But from my viewpoint, soon after making it to the House or the Senate, something goes dreadfully wrong. Instead of working to address the needs of their constituents, most officeholders soon become part of the problem. They become part of the reason why “In the latest rankings from Gallup, about 79 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress.”

Before you assume that Americans are just reflexively ungrateful, let’s consider how we reward our congressmen and women.

To begin with, most of the people we send to Congress are better off financially than the average citizen. “About one percent of all Americans are millionaires, but roughly 46 percent of those serving in Congress have a net worth of $1 million or more, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. There’s nothing wrong with being rich. But there is a problem when the people creating tax and economic policy for the whole nation are unfamiliar with the kind of financial stress faced by a typical family with a median income of less than $50,000 per year.”

Regardless of what wealth our senators and representatives bring with them, rank and file members receive salaries of $174,000 per year. But that ain’t all. There is also a choice of retirement plans, gold-plated health care, and a long list of conveniences and other perks. “A recent study by Our Generation and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, two nonprofit research groups, found that fringe benefits for members of Congress are worth about $82,000 per year—which raises total compensation to well over $250,000. There may be a retirement crisis in many parts of America—but not on Capitol Hill.” Is it any wonder that these people are seemingly incapable of empathizing with ordinary Americans who have lost jobs, homes, and an average of 40% of their wealth during the Great Recession?

One of the facts of life in the Washington culture is the prevalence of lobbyists—22 for every member of Congress. And if they seem to know their way around, it is because many of them are former members. “This ‘shadow Congress,’ funded by corporations and various interest groups, is nearly as powerful as the real one. Whatever the case, lobbyists certainly have more sway over Congress than voters writing plaintive letters or placing earnest calls to their elected officials.” Money is the lingua franca of the culture. And if you can’t offer more than the other side is offering, your voice goes unheard.

Some of Congress’ problems are structural. In business, competition and innovation drive progress. “Congress, by contrast, still operates by ancient procedures and dallies indefinitely on business that seems urgent to most people, like addressing the weak economy or the mushrooming national debt. There’s no measure of effectiveness for Congress as a whole, and some members even insist that gridlock—a euphemism for accomplishing nothing—is in the nation’s interest. Try that one on your boss some day, and see how long you last.”

Additionally, there seems to be no penalty for ignorance. “Members of Congress sometimes reveal a dangerous degree of ignorance on vitally important issues they have considerable power to regulate. Earlier this year, the science journal Nature argued that the House Energy and Commerce Committee had ‘entered the intellectual wilderness’ by expressing ‘willful ignorance’ on climate science. Over the summer, The Economist called Republican debt-ceiling negotiators ‘economically illiterate,’ as Michele Bachmann and others dismissed the idea that a default on the nation’s debt would be economically damaging.”

Not every member of Congress is oblivious to its shortcomings. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) is throwing in the towel after serving since 1995. He likens Congress to a drunk “who needs to hit bottom in order to straighten out.” Explaining why he is not coming back, he cites the partisan atmosphere that makes it impossible to conduct the nation’s business. LaTourette expresses his greatest scorn for uberlobbyist Grover Norquist who wields his no-tax pledge as a means to control the vote on any tax-related legislation.

Rick Newman, chief business correspondent for U. S. News summarizes the problem—and the solution. “Sorry, people, but regular citizens bear some of the blame for the sorry state of affairs in Washington. Politicians manipulate voters every day with half-truths—or outright lies—about taxes, spending, retirement, healthcare, immigration, and many other issues that directly affect the nation’s prosperity. Too many voters embrace feel-good propaganda that they want to hear instead of learning the basic facts about issues they care about. They should do a better job of calling out dishonest politicians—and shunning media outlets that stoke political food fights. If voters want something better, they need to start by knowing what it might look like.”

So there’s enough blame to go around. As I wrote in “More Bang for Our Buck,” if good government is important to us, we’re going to have to take a hand in it.

Congress obviously can’t help itself.

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Ignorance is a choice: Money is power—Knowledge is more powerful.

What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” That’s a famous quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, The Rich Boy. He had his reasons for writing that, and I have my reasons for believing it—the reasons being what I have observed of our Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

Being wealthy does not disqualify a person running for President of the United States. Wealth has advantages to attaining public office, especially if you’ve earned it yourself. But Mitt Romney’s wealth, and how he earned it, have raised legitimate questions at a time of economic distress for the poor and middle classes versus unprecedented gains for the wealthiest. The “bottom 50 percent of American households held just 1.1 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2010… while the top 10 percent of earners held a whopping 74.5 percent of the nation’s wealth during the same period.”

This issue becomes especially relevant when Mitt Romney makes a connection between his success in business and his fitness to run the country. On Sunday, July 27, GPS host Fareed Zakaria interviewed two world-class economists, Paul Krugman and Ken Rogoff on the subject of Romney and the economy. They are not impressed with Mitt Romney’s claims that his performance at Bain Capital qualifies him for the presidency.

Paul Krugman: “Romney does not have a coherent, comprehensive economic program. It’s very difficult to figure out what, if anything, he’s proposing aside from tax cuts for the rich—for people like himself. A lot of it has been ‘trust me. I’m a successful businessman. I know how to make things work.’

“And then the question is, ‘Well, exactly how did you get so rich?’ Those are legitimate questions…. We have always expected presidential candidates to be very forthcoming about their personal history, their personal financial history—about their business career, if they’ve had one. Romney is trying to keep everything he did in his life before 2010 under a shroud.”

And then Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff weighs in: “I think that the fact he paid a 14% tax rate is a real issue. It’s incredibly unfair. Now, he didn’t break the law. He didn’t make the law. But he ought to say, ‘My policies are going to change the law.’”

An editorial from The Iola Register provides some context: “Fundamental to the art of governing in a democracy is the ability to accommodate the views and convictions of others. Equally important is the ability to choose outstanding men and women to serve in the cabinet and then to work with those co-administrators in harmony.

“Captains of industry, in contrast, are by nature autocrats. They are accustomed to having their decisions carried out. They are not natural compromisers. They tend not to appoint co-workers who might become competitors for authority. When they are right, their companies succeed. When they are wrong, they are replaced and disappear, a process which happens much more abruptly in industry than can occur in the elected offices of our government.

“The point is that the United States of America is not a giant corporation that can be administered as though it were IBM or Google. The skills and personal attributes that lead to business success are not transferable to the presidency. That isn’t to say that a good business man cannot become a capable governor or president. But it is to argue that making a ton of money by reorganizing sick corporations is just as likely to give a man a false sense of his ability to solve America’s problems as it is to turn him into the next Abraham Lincoln—who, incidentally, never was much of a business success.”

As much as Romney the businessman proved successful in securing profits for his shareholders, we voters need to ask ourselves whether this brand of success would help him be a better president because of it. Or does it entirely unfit him to be the compassionate leader for our tumultuous time as Abraham Lincoln was to his?

The next four articles will deal with how well “We the People” are holding Congress, the Supreme Court and the President responsible for the discharge their Constitutional role of checks and balances among the three branches of government.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…