WOULD-BE FUNDERS OF THAT NICE, ANTI-PARTISAN PAUL RYAN SURE LIKED PARTISANSHIP BEFORE

A couple of days ago, we learned this:

The Observer can now report that Todd Ricketts, the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs who is also the son of the founder of Ameritrade, is arranging a meeting of some of the GOP’s top financial bundlers, to be attended by [Paul] Ryan. The meeting is to take place next week at the Mandarin Hotel and will be comprised of a discussion with “twenty or so” Republican donors, including Mr. Ricketts and several people he has raised money with before....

[Ricketts] is the CEO of the Ending Spending Super PAC....

Ricketts and his allies are backing Ryan as what -- a potential 2016 presidential candidate in an open convention? A pseudo-presidential candidate positioning himself as an alternative party leader so that voters alienated by the party's real presidential candidate, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, will still believe it's worth voting Republican in House and Senate races?

Whatever's going on, Ryan's message is that hyper-partisanship is just awful:

What really bothers me about politics these days… https://t.co/e1WwMhkrxmhttps://t.co/qXNJqLFhsH

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) April 7, 2016

"What really bothers me the most about politics these days is this notion of identity politics: that we’re going to win an election by dividing people, rather than inspiring people on our common humanity and our common ideals and our common culture on the things that should unify us. We all want to be prosperous. We all want to be healthy. We want everybody to succeed. We want people to reach their potential in their lives.

"Now, liberals and conservatives are going to disagree with one another on that. No problem. That’s what this is all about.

"So let’s have a battle of ideas. Let’s have a contest of whose ideas are better and why our ideas are better."

That's odd, because, as I recall, the Ricketts family seemed much less squeamish about "dividing people" in the past. Let's go back to 2012:

A group of high-profile Republican strategists is working with a conservative billionaire on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the "super PAC" era and attack President Obama in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from.

Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the ... plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr....

"The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way," says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade....

(Joe Ricketts is the father of Todd Ricketts.)

Brian Baker, president and general counsel of a super PAC called the Ending Spending Action Fund, said Mr. Ricketts had studied several advertising proposals in recent months....

Yup, that was also the work of Ending Spending.

“Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do: Show the world how Barack Obama’s opinions of America and the world were formed,” the proposal says. “And why the influence of that misguided mentor and our president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees.”

And then, a couple of weeks later...

... the billionaire investor Joe Ricketts ... is involved in another effort slated for this summer, a documentary film based on a widely criticized book, "The Roots of Obama's Rage" by Dinesh D'Souza, which asserts that Mr. Obama is carrying out the "anticolonial" agenda of his Kenyan father.

Mr. Ricketts's aides said he was one of roughly two dozen investors, providing only 5 percent of the film's budget. But ... Mr. Ricketts's aides also said that he had helped pay for newspaper and Internet advertisements promoting Mr. D'Souza's book in late 2010, one of which called it "the book the White House doesn't want you to read," and warned, "The real Barack Obama is even worse than you think." ...

That would be this:



Yeah, divisiveness really upsets the Ricketts family. I sure can see why Paul Ryan's eloquent call for American unity appeals to them.