Travels with right-wing nuts: My road trip on Route GOP with Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann

One liberal, three GOP strongholds: What a drive through Ryan and Bachmann country says about America right now

ERIC LUTZ

Janesville is boring.

It’s Nov. 4, just after 11 a.m. The sky is the color of steel, the air hibernal. I’m walking past Rep. Paul Ryan’s district office. Except for some people waiting for a bus, there’s nobody else outside.

I’ve come here from Chicago on a sort of anthropological mission: Over the next four days, I’ll see Paul Ryan’s congressional district in southern Wisconsin, Michele Bachmann’s district in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, and Steve King’s district in western Iowa – a 1,200 mile drive across the Midwest in search of the region’s secrets. I’m not sure what I expect to find, but I hope visiting these places, and trying to understand them, will shed some light on the political right wing currently waging war on the federal government — or at least paint a portrait of the culture they were birthed from.

Tall order for a road trip, I know.

Ryan’s Janesville office is wildly unassuming, considering the breadth of his influence. Elected to the House in 1998, he rose to national prominence in 2011 when he became chairman of the House Budget Committee, and quarterbacked the GOP’s much-loathed 2012 budget proposal — seeking to slash government programs and repeal the Affordable Care Act, while of course leaving Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy untouched. Though the Ryan Budget proved unpopular with the American public, it instantly became the right’s economic blueprint, catapulting the representative from Wisconsin’s 1st district to A-list status in the GOP.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/08/my_road_trip_on_route_gop/