So the right-center establishment consensus on Ryan is that “hey, you might not like the details, but at LEAST HE HAS A PLAN”. Remember the last time we were told that there was a big threat and that we should support an ill-planned audacious role of the dice to deal with it?
With Iraq, we were told that there was a great national debate about taking the country to war or some bullshit like that. We’re being told that now about vouchercare. Greg Sargent absolutely nails it:
Ever since Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, it’s been widely claimed that this ensures a “great debate” pitting two starkly different ideological visions over the future against one another. But it’s now clear that the GOP ticket doesn’t want a great debate at all. Their entire strategy is designed to obscure the true ideological differences between both sides.
[….]How on earth is this a great debate? It’s actually an effort to avoid one. Anyone who continues to grant Romney and Ryan the presumption of being serious about engaging in a great clash of visions is only helping them avoid accountability for the true nature of their actual vision.
I still think Ryan was a bad pick because any discussion of vouchercare — no matter how inane and propagandist — is likely to help Democrats, especially when the other option is talking about the economy. An “honest debate” would make Ryan’s policies even more politically toxic. But there will be none, of course, and Republicans counted on that with this the same as they counted on that with Iraq and all the others.