Ryan Booed at Town Hall Meeting

Josh Marshall reports for Talking Points Memo that Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) got booed at a town hall meeting in his district over his refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy to reduce the federal deficit.

Conservative blogger David Frum is right. The GOP has badly miscalculated the public's support for its pet policies of slashing entitlements and tax cuts for the wealthy. The right-wing media megaphone of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others is a political benefit to the GOP in getting its message out.

However, the weakness of the conservative movement's reliance on it is that its thinkers live in a bubble, cut off from those independents that it must win over if they are to compete in national elections. When others, like Ryan's town hall audience, don't buy into notions like tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves through the economic growth they stimulate, modern day Republicans don't know how to respond. They will have to learn to respond if they hope to have a chance in 2012.

UPDATE: Other GOP Congressmen are facing similar discontent around the country according to Jennifer Steinhauer and Carl Hulse of The New York Times.

--Ballard Burgher