Written by Charles D. Ellison

 

 

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget passed more than two weeks ago, but Beltway pundits and lawmakers are wrangling as if it’s still on the House floor. That 219 Republicans voted for it on April 10only cemented the budget as a non-starter in a Democratic-held Senate - which wasn’t planning on passing a budget anyway. Ryan gave Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada added reason not to.

 

What the controversial House Budget Committee chair’s fiscal manifesto has managed to accomplish is to revive a number of debates that were back burnered by battles over the Affordable Care Act. While Republicans are still holding on to hopes that overkill messaging on Obamacare will be enough to galvanize Obama-hating base voters to the polls in November, Democrats may have seen an opening with the Ryan budget to recapture early narratives on Congressional midterms.

 

Democrats are desperately struggling to find an offense in 2014. And according to some recent polling, they’ve got something they can dance to. Two of the last five most prominent generic Congressional ballots show Democrats with an average lead of just 1.6 percentage points. It might not seem like much, but it’s better than where they were just several months ago as Republicans were pummeling the Obama administration on ACA enrollments.

 

Since late March, just as early details over the Ryan budget emerged, noticeable bumps for Democrats began to bubble up: the libertarian or center-right leaning Reason/Rupe poll showed Democrats ahead by four points; Quinnipiac put them over by two points; and McClatchy/Marist College offered a six-point advantage while predictably conservative-friendly Rasmussen and FOX News polls squeaked out, respectively, one and three percentage point leads for Republicans.

 

Seven days after the GOP caucus signed on to a cut-happy Ryan Budget viewed as unsanitized surgery on the poor, Congressional Democrats were a full 2.5 percentage points ahead of Congressional Republicans in a RealClearPolitics aggregated November matchup.

 

Ryan didn’t seem to help his cause any, throwing fuel on a crackling brushfire when he stumbled on what critics saw as a thinly-veiled racist dog whistle.

 

“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” said Ryan during a mid-March segment of conservative Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show citing Bell Curve theorist Charles Murray. “There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

 

That was just enough for Congressional Black Caucus members to begin hitting Ryan hard and to caricature the Budget Committee chairman as an ambitious, insensitive politician moonlighting as a numbers geek.

 

A month later, CBC Chair Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio is still grinding that axe.

 

“I think calling what Paul Ryan is doing a budget is lending some validity to it,” said Fudge last week during one of many appearances on Rev. Al Sharpton’s PoliticsNation show. “It’s not a budget. If it were a budget, he could justify his revenue projections. He could justify his cuts, and he can’t. This is a scheme to rob the poor and give to the rich.”

 

It was a theme that rang all week as the CBC sought a fresh attack on the GOP’s poverty record - or lack thereof. Fudge, along with other caucus members, spent time blasting the House-passed Ryan budget all week, from a conference call with reporters to strategic hits on the Wisconsin Congressman as if he was running for president.

 

“If there really is any good intention, the caucus might be willing to work with him,” Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, a CBC Member and lone black Congressperson from Ryan’s home state, offered during a conversation with The Philadelphia Tribune. “I mean, I kind of like him because he sometimes thinks outside of the ideological box, and I know how tough that is on that side. If there was some broad agreement on some points, that could be a starting point.”

 

Instead, the conversation on poverty seemed muffled by Ryan budget controversies. While that budget was the focus of fiscal conversations, the CBC’s annual budget – a robust numbers-crunching exercise that never gets scored by the Congressional Budget Office and hardly gets any media attention – appeared to push an alternative mix of anti-poverty programs and economic growth initiatives.

 

Ryan’s budget committee office did not return the Tribune’s repeated requests for comment on whether or not there was any common ground.

 

Moore hopes for strategies in which private enterprise and public agencies are partnered up to wisely access or leverage enterprise zones. “We could be aligning that with critical workforce development and education programs, something folks throughout all inner cities want.”

 

“We can really challenge his assumptions about them being lazy and not working.”

 

Moore described her fellow Badger Stater as a “nice guy,” but tremendously naïve. “I don’t think he’d use the N-word or anything like that,” quipped Moore.

 

“But he misses things,” Moore said. “He sees this great American story and misses out on the parts on racial discrimination.”

 

 

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