Boehner messes up Paul Ryan’s image rehab: Attacks unemployed as lazy and unmotivated

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/19/boehner_messes_up_paul_ryans_image_rehab_attacks_unemployed_as_lazy_and_unmotivated/



Remember Ryan wanted to change his party's perception on poverty? Boehner's new comments are not going to help

Boehner messes up Paul Ryan’s image rehab: Attacks unemployed as lazy and unmotivated
Simon Maloy
Friday, Sep 19, 2014 01:25 PM EST

John Boehner stopped by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC yesterday to give a speech laying out his vision for America’s economic future. The speech itself was a waste of time – roughly 15 minutes of bland praise for tax reform, spending cuts, deregulation, and all the other boilerplate conservative policy prescriptions. It wasn’t until the floor opened up for questions that Boehner said anything interesting.

~snip~

Isn’t that nice? Anyone who’s been following Paul Ryan’s poverty tour knows that one of the big reasons he’s doing it in the first place is to rehab the image that he and the rest of the GOP have earned over the years as being hostile to the poor and less fortunate. Ryan once happily divided the country into “makers” and “takers” – people who were worthwhile contributors to society versus people who leeched off the prosperity of others. He’s since disavowed that language and tried to inject some compassion into the GOP’s rhetoric when it comes to poor. (His policy prescriptions are paternalistic and seek to punish people for not being successful enough.)

So naturally Boehner, when asked about Ryan’s efforts, does everything he can to undo them and imputes onto the nation’s jobless the “sick idea” that they don’t actually want jobs. Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress rightly points out one of the traps of long-term unemployment is that the longer you’re unemployed, the less employable you become. “Research shows that being unemployed for nine months has the same impact on your odds of getting hired as losing four full years of experience from a résumé.” There are lots of unemployed people who want work, but they’ve been out of the game for so long (thanks to the recession) that it’s supremely difficult to get back in. And, it should be pointed out, Congressional Republicans made their situation a whole lot worse by refusing to extend long-term unemployment benefits.

This is the problem facing Ryan and other Republicans who want to change the public’s view of the GOP. The notion that poverty and joblessness are products of a lack of effort are ingrained into conservative thinking, so much so that the Republican Speaker of the House will stand before a right-wing think tank and pretend to speak in the voice of a lazy poor person who would “just rather sit around.”