Paul Ryan's Personal Brand Sure Has Turned To Crap

Do you remember a woman with the nom de guerre "Valley Girl" from early blogging days? She's been around the netroots for as long as there has been a netroots and I value her advise. She just wrote to me to tell me that she's been watching Randy Bryce's speeches on line and that in her opinion, he will be this generation's Bernie Sanders. That's big.

Sunday we looked at how Randy has created-- seemingly in record time but in reality, over the course of years-- a platinum brand for himself, something the DCCC has been utterly incapable of helping their hapless batch of loser candidates do. But forget the DCCC for a moment; I want to talk about Paul Ryan's brand and how astonishingly rapidly it has been turning to crap. The media largely created Ryan over the years and the media has finally started realizing they've been had.

Ryan is not the fresh young face of some kind of humanistic conservatism. He's the same monster and the same fraud with the same austerity message that lies at the dark heart of conservatism. One of the biggest electoral questions for 2018 will be whether voters in southeast Wisconsin have come to that conclusion as well. Ryan, after all, gets re-elected with pretty big margins every cycle. Forget for a moment that the DCCC not only doesn't help his opponents but actively sabotages them and lets just stick to Ryan. Wall Street and other corporate special interests have invested millions of dollars into his career. The Finance Sector alone has given him $9,781,835, more than any other member of the House-- by far. (The second in Finance Sector bribes is House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling and his take has been a lot less, just $7,468,190. The crooked Democrat in the House who takes the biggest bribes from the banksters is Joe Crowley, as corrupt as Ryan and Hensarling, and his take has been considerably less than Ryan's-- $6,238,679. In any case, my point is that Ryan has, long ago, ceased to even make a plausible pretense of representing the working families of southeast Wisconsin. He represents Wall Street and the special interests that fill his campaign coffers year in and year out. And his personal brand is... worse than tarnished.

A couple of weeks ago, political journalist Brian Krassenstein wrote that Ryan was paid $20 million to get behind Trump. Does that sound believable? I had never heard that but it was worth reading the charges. A lot of Krassenstein's material comes from a very credible source, Scott Dworkin, of the The Democratic Coalition Against Trump.

You may recall that back on June 2 of last year, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan finally endorsed Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. While Ryan had been a holdout, questioning if Trump really was the right man to lead the Republican party in the 2016 election, something had obviously changed for him. It certainly wasn’t Trump’s words or actions, which seemed to have gotten more and more insane as time went by. So what could it have been? Money?

On August 29th, approximately three months after Paul Ryan endorsed Donald Trump, two of Trump’s largest campaign donors, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson donated a staggering $20 million to Paul Ryan’s super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund. To put things into perspective, these donations represent approximately 40% of all the donations received by the Congressional Leadership Fund for the entire year of 2016.

While there is no smoking gun, it certainly appears that Ryan was paid big money to endorse a man that he knew was unfit to be President of the United States. It seems like the ‘swamp’ was only drained of the clean water, leaving the sludge and dead fish behind.

This is what Randy Bryce is up against-- for better and for worse, better because Ryan's brand is mud and worse because Ryan has millions and millions of dollars at his disposal to try to undermine Bryce's brand. For Randy Bryce to win he's not going to have to raise the tens of millions of dollars Ryan can raise by fluffing every special interest in the country-- but he is going to have to keep getting out his message about working families and equality of opportunity. If you can, please consider helping Randy out by tapping on the thermometer on the right and giving what you can. It takes a lot of $25 contributions to add up to even a tenth of what Ryan takes from just one big donor like the extraordinarily sleazy Mob-connected Adelson family!