Posted on 02/29/2016 11:36:03 AM PST by Citizen Zed
Last month, six GOP presidential candidates met in South Carolina to discuss something of a lapsed issue for the Republican Party: helping the poor. The Jan. 9 forum, co-hosted by House Speaker Paul Ryan, played out like a hallucination of the primary season party leaders had hoped for. The tone was compassionate and inclusive. People debated, in depth, real policies. And Donald Trump was nowhere to be seen.
For Paul Ryan, the moment was a minor triumph. Ryan has been striving since the last presidential election to make poverty the GOP’s next big issue. As RNC chairman Reince Priebus argued in 2013, the party’s long-term success depends on shedding its image as the “party of the rich,” of the “narrow-minded” and the “out of touch.” A campaign to combat poverty using Republican principles could jumpstart that transformation.
Ryan takes the project so seriously that he cited it as one of his reasons for sitting out the 2016 race. “I wanted to make sure this got away from presidential politics,” he told Yahoo News’s Jon Ward last March. “I wanted to make sure that this got some distance from being seen as some personal ambitious project for a politician.”
But rise of Donald Trump dashed many dreams among the Republican establishment, among them Ryan’s plan to pivot the party toward fighting poverty.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
Barack Obama loved the poor.
Love them so much, he made some more.
Liberals measure compassion by how many people are on some form of government relief.
Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.
One way to do that would be for idiots like Priebus to stop conceding that Republican policies are out of touch, narrow minded and for the rich or that the GOP somehow has to change or soft-pedal conservative policies to be for the poor. "Compassionate conservatism" was a disaster when Bush and Rove were pushing it.
“Helping the poor” has become the Uniparty’s code words for enacting socialism. Appeals to the moral vanity of hypocrites, like the Big Government apparatchiks who put as many alms as possible into their own pockets as finder’s fees.
Is neither.
Exceedingly well put: A+
They had a meeting. What did that accomplish exactly?
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