Blue Mass Group

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The Numbers Guy

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Paul Ryan being interviewed by conservative Hugh Hewitt:

HH: Are you still running?

PR: Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or yes.

HH: But you did run marathons at some point?

PR: Yeah, but I can’t do it anymore, because my back is just not that great.

HH: I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best?

PR: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.

HH: Holy smokes. All right, now you go down to Miami University…

PR: I was fast when I was younger, yeah.

That’s fast. Runner’s World followed up:

It turns out Paul Ryan has not run a marathon in less than three hours—or even less than four hours.

A spokesman confirmed late Friday that the Republican vice presidential candidate has run one marathon. That was the 1990 Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, where Ryan, then 20, is listed as having finished in 4 hours, 1 minute, and 25 seconds.

Ryan had said in a radio interview last week that his personal best was “Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.”

Perhaps he has a varsity letter in mendacity, too.

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Comments

  2. a hearty “Bravo!” to Runner’s World for investigating, and then calling out Ryan on his bullshit. It’s kind of sad that a sports magazine is doing a better job than most of the mainstream media on holding politicians accountable for what they say.

  3. Really? Anyone who has ever done any running at all knows that it’s impossible to have a memory slip between running a marathon in under 3 hours and running it in over 4.

    • since I ran any distance in an actual competitive race, and I could tell you what my best time is for nearly every distance I ever raced. I would expect that to be the same for nearly all serious runners. Certainly anyone serious to break three hours for a marathon.

      • If you break a three hour marathon, you know the time you got. It’s like breaking a 4 minute mile, a claim one of my less credible colleagues once asserted. She also claimed to have had scurvy, so…I wonder if Paul Ryan has had scurvy?

  5. As a runner, I could quote you fairly accurately what my personal bests are in a 5K, 10K and half marathon. If I ever accomplished a marathon, you could bet that without fail I would have that time memorized and cauterized into memory.

    Runners, by habit and by culture, know this stuff.

  6. This is in compulsive liar territory, clearly a person to whom the truth doesn’t matter — and completely unnecessary. Finishing a marathon is a feat that almost anyone would respect. Done. No need to screw up that accomplishment. Ginning down a time is pathetic in itself. But cheating to a serious runner’s threshold, that’s manipulative and pathological behavior.

    • Agree with tblade: as a runner you would never make an honest mistake on anywhere close to this order–only someone who wanted to boast and assumed that no one would care to check would like like this about something so obvious–yet more evidence that Ryan will lie about almost anything.

  7. “The race was more than 20 years ago, but my brother Tobin — who ran Boston last year — reminds me that he is the owner of the fastest marathon in the family and has never himself ran a sub-three. If I were to do any rounding, it would certainly be to four hours, not three. He gave me a good ribbing over this at dinner tonight.”

    They should have asked him how many women he had sex with in college since nobody has ever exaggerated that number? Or how big that fish was…

    Ryan should never had answered and told him he’d get back to him, but he didn’t.

    This will be good fodder for you guys (and you guys only). But you are also part of the problem as you stick the “LIAR” tag on someone who makes a mistake of something that happened 20 years ago. I know your tribalism will compel you to be mean spirited but if we call any pol who makes a small insignificant mistake on 20 year old events, then we may as well call them all LIARS…

    Warren had boasted to the National Journal that Wall Street executives have told her: “I want to support your campaign because you will save capitalism.”

    • Having read johnd for about five years now, I can now discern a theory with which he approaches these discussions. It runs like this:

      * Answering important questions empirically and scientifically is near impossible because there are so many competing points of view. For every link, he can throw up; I can throw up an answering link.

      * Therefore, it all boils down to whom you like and don’t like and that explains how we all decide things.

      * Democrats, liberals “don’t like” rich people and that explains the tax policies we advocate. We “don’t like” Paul Ryan, so we mechanically accuse him of lying. We “like” Obama so everything he says we treat like sayings of the Messiah. We “like” Warren, so we think everything about her is positive.

      I find this theory completely annoying because at its base it is nothing but a monstrous ad hominem argument*.

      And I am unwilling to accept the first point. You can’t have a reasonable, non-rancorous discussion if you start with believing rational discussion impossible and useless.

      In the case of Paul Ryan, his “budget” consists of cutting taxes and then making inhumane cuts in social spending that do not even offset a third of those tax cuts. He gets around that by two means: (1) he claims he will close unnamed tax loopholes and (2) he makes economic forecasts based on nothing at all that make his budget numbers work. To call himself a “fiscal conservative” or an “innovative” thinker is just like claiming he ran a marathon in under three hours. It is a lie. It is a lie that fits a pattern. It is a lie that it doesn’t take much research to expose.

      ______________________________________
      *I’m using the formal definition of ad hominem. For example accusations of hypocrisy are ad hominem.

      • Or maybe I should…

        Not a bad synopsis, both on how I feel and how it is. I’ve said for years that I like answering emotionally and how people “feel”. Our arguments often go like… You say “this food has the right amount of salt, sweetness, texture… and should be delicious to anyone who eats it” and I reply “Ya, but I don’t like it. I don’t know why, I just don’t”. And you reply “but it has .5mg salt/ounce which is optimal…” and I reply, “So what, I don’t like it…”.

        And whether you like my ways or disagree with them, I do believe they hold water. I predict fairly well how people will act here based on the “who you like/dislike” on a regular basis. Sometimes I try to break them out of their predictable reactions with my own counter reactions.

        I would say there are occasions of cognitive disonance here where people will really ignore facts about people and go with their gut. I’m sure if it came out that Romney or Ryan’s plans were well thought out and effective, people will still vote against them. Maybe we base our feelings on amore holistic summary opinion of people and these isolated facts and stories just don’t move the needle enough for us to change.

        How would you like it to go? Let’s assume you’re right and you guys call them as you see them. You don’t follow Obama loyally and strongly criticize his lame position on DOMA, not closing Gitmo, not supporting Labor Unions as he should, lackluster support of Wisconsin recall… but you keep supporting Obama and will vote for him without question. How is that different from Republicans hearing all your complaints against Romney and still voicing their support for Romney?

        You do have a particularly strong negative feeling (see, I didn’t say hate) against Paul Ryan. I’m curious how you think he’ll do it the debates. If what you are saying is true about his lies, won’t that be easy for the MSM to get headlined and ruin his credibility?

        • A recent Rasmussen survey shows a significant shift of voters self identifying their party affiliation towards the GOP. I know this is just a survey but based on the history from the survey I think this type of datapoint contributes to feelings I have about things, but I may not be able to quantify that feeling as I attribute weight to issues. The most noticeable shift is from the GOP trailing by 7.6% in Nov 2008 to the GOP leading by 4.3% now. Just the way I think I guess…

          Survey of Part affiliation

          Date
          Republican
          Democrat
          Other
          GOP vs. Dem

          Aug 2012
          37.6%
          33.3%
          29.2%
          4.3%

          Nov 2010
          37.0%
          33.7%
          29.3%
          3.3%

          Aug 2012
          32.8%
          41.4%
          24.7%
          -7.6%

          • that bottom group should be titled Aug 2008. Also, I put these into a table which previewed fine but actually displayed unformatted… any ideas why?

    • I don’t think it is very likely that this just a mistaken memory. While the lie itself is not especially meaningful to the office of the Vice Presidency. It strongly suggests that Ryan is someone how has become used to lying with impunity to make himself look better and to get his way. I do think it is a strong indictment against his character.

      It’s too bad that habitual lying is no longer considered a character flaw by those on the Right.

    • The individual actors, by the way, may all want specific regulations relaxed, but our capitalist system strongly depends on regulation and honesty. When those go away, we get a kleptocracy. E. Warren’s statement is entirely believable.

      *

      Are you telling me it’s okay to lie provided you retract and apologize once you get caught? Please, johnd, don’t teach Sunday school.

      • No kidding. Now we know that lying about who you have had sex with, what fish you have caught and your marathon times don’t really count as lies, at least as long as you are member of the Republican party in good standing.

        You remember when “integrity” meant that you didn’t tell lies about anything?

        • I would have thought that regardless of our various opinions on policy, we could all agree that different standards should apply when running for national office than when bragging at a frat party. Guess not.

    • He mis-truthed. Misspeaking is when you say something inelegantly or by mistake. George W. Bush was, of course, the king of misstatements. Here’s a classic example: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” He wasn’t lying, just inarticulate.

      Ryan, on the other hand, shows no signs of experiencing such a lingual mishap. I read the transcript, but I also listened to the recording of the interview. You can hear him thinking about HH’s question. You can also read it in the transcript. He says, “under three, high twos, two hour and fifty something.” Maybe he truly believed that he broke 3-hours for a marathon, but he didn’t tell the truth, and as TBlade & CMD point out, it’s highly unlikely that a runner would forget such an achievement.

      Warren, on the other hand, misspoke, sounded like an idiot, and paid the price. My guess, she met some execs who agree with what she thinks, and either screwed up in her synopsis of their conversation or, as she said, ““I passed along a comment that was over the top, and it was silly for me to do so.” It’s arguable whether or not her words open a window to her soul (“you will save capitalism”?), but I don’t think she was stating a mistruth.

    • The interview went thusly:

      P. R.: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.
      H. H.: Holy smokes. All right, now you go down to Miami University…
      P. R.: I was fast when I was younger, yeah.

      Just like a golfer fibbing about his handicap. He just didn’t realize that he put himself into making-the-cut-at-The Masters territory. If he wasn’t aware that that he was exaggerating, he would have backed down at the “Holy smokes.” People are impressed by the completion of a marathon at 4 hours, but not “holy smokes” impressed. Perhaps he is no longer able to recognize unearned praise and admiration.

  8. On running

    Mr. Ryan tried to laugh the whole thing off as a simple error. But serious runners find that implausible: the difference between sub-three and over-four is the difference between extraordinary and perfectly ordinary, and it’s not something a runner could get wrong, unless he’s a fabulist who imagines his own reality. And does suggesting that Mr. Ryan is delusional rather than dishonest actually make the situation any better?

    On the budget:

    But didn’t the Congressional Budget Office evaluate Mr. Ryan’s plan and conclude that it would indeed reduce the deficit? I’m glad you asked that. You see, the budget office didn’t actually evaluate his plan, because there weren’t enough details. Instead, it let Mr. Ryan specify paths for future spending and revenue, while noting — in what sounds to me like a hint of snark — that “No proposals were specified that would generate that path.”

    So Mr. Ryan basically told the budget office to assume that his plan would slash the deficit, then claimed the resulting report as vindication of his deficit-slashing claims. Sorry, but that’s the policy equivalent of sneaking into a marathon near the finish line, then claiming victory.

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