Peter Suderman says Democrats are casting Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has put forth a plan privatizing elements of Social Security and Medicare as a "supervillain":
So what's more telling: that Republicans have fretted so much about signing on to Ryan's plan? Or that Democrats and their defenders feel so threatened by Ryan's plan to reduce the deficit, leave entitlements exactly the same for a full decade, and balance the budget 52 years from now, when most of Washington's current political class will be covering boring disputes between the angels over St. Peter's gate-keeping policies? I'll let that be a cliffhanger.
The straightforward answer is that Democrats believe when it comes that Ryan's plan will prove unpopular with voters, because rather than dealing abstractly with spending cuts, it applies them to popular programs. As far as the "supervillain" thing goes, all the Democratic legislators Suderman quotes are all objecting to Ryan on policy grounds. It's not like they're actually accusing Ryan of doing something he doesn't want to do. The closest you get to the 24/7 drumbeat of Obamafascism on Fox News and talk radio among Suderman's examples is Katrina Vanden Heuvel calling Ryan an "Ayn Rand-quoting zealot” whose “rhetoric is a barely varnished echo of the ravings of Glenn Beck.”
But look, is it at all surprising that Democrats don't like the idea of privatizing the welfare state? That Democrats see balancing the budget by making drastic cuts to social welfare services as bad policy? Democrats call Ryan's proposal radical, but that's because it is radical in the sense that it would be a big change from the status quo. It's also why libertarians and conservatives like it, and why liberals don't. This is about as clean and plain as an ideological dispute gets.
