• Is Christie Abandoning His True Base? 
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[Chris] Christie let [conservative-leaning New York financier admirers] down by declining to run for president, and now he's really let them down by cozying up to Obama and then making a very strong, very high-profile articulation for why functioning government matters and why Ayn Rand isn't much good in a hurricane.      View blog reactions

• • Paul Ryan, Global Thinker? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Paul Ryan  | After [Paul Ryan] was selected as Romney’s running mate, I took a closer look at how it was that the young Wisconsin congressman had developed a reputation as a big thinker, despite the fact that the numbers in his grand manifesto didn’t really add up and that his intellectual underpinnings seemed more Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged than Locke and Oakeshott.      View blog reactions

• How To Judge The Right’s Flight From Romney 
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Paul Ryan  | Romney had given vent to a widely shared Republican worldview about the threat of growing dependency, a worldview with strong roots in conservative think thanks [...] and in rising star Republicans such as...Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan, who liked to warn of the coming “tipping point” in government dependency, who spoke in Randian terms of “makers and takers,” and who had not long ago even put his own numerical estimate on the proportion of Americans succumbing to cosseted sloth, 30 percent. The problem was that Romney had failed to give that harsh assessment the sheen that conservatives have for years been burnishing it with to make it presentable in public: the sheen of aspiration.      View blog reactions

• • The ultra-conservative Paul Ryan is the target Obama wanted most 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | In his early years in the capital, [Ryan] soaked heavily in not only standard free-market tracts but also the novels of Ayn Rand; whereas most leave their Randian enthusiasm behind in the college dorm room, Ryan has carried his well into adulthood, passing out copies of Atlas Shrugged to his staff and declaring in 2005: “[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”      View blog reactions