Patrick Appel thinks Democrats should be worried by Paul Ryan’s oratorical skills. Seems to me like a string of tired sound-bites – mostly lies – with a junior-high-school-level delivery that consistently puts the accent on the wrong sylLAble. So far, I’m not losing any sleep.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
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I am just as worried as the White House seems to be. You may have seen this official response:
http://i.imgur.com/t6qK0.gif
Sweet
Mark, I had precisely the same response as you. Ryan’s oration skills seem very much like a talented high school junior running for class vice-president.
Nonetheless, all of the joyful cheering from the Dems about their good fortune has me worried, for two reasons. 1) If we portray things too much as a slam-dunk, people will say on election day “we’ve got this in the bag, so I don’t need to go to the polls,” and 2) Ryan just may have talents we haven’t seen or noticed–by all evidence, he’s far smarter and more capable than Palin. And his politics (if the Ryan Plan is anything to go by) imply that he’s willing to be a bit ruthless and cruel.
You’ll remember that in the couple of days after Palin was picked, McCain went up in the polls and Democrats started to panic. I’m wary of these initial gut reactions, because they’re so frequently wrong. I’d prefer that the Dems at least pretended that Ryan was a challenging contender, and became aggressive with their opposition research and pressure on him, rather than assuming Ryan’s a terrible VP pick.
Ryan’s a nasty little piece of work and clearly believes he’s got a big, swinging dick. Well, he’s already fallen over that dick a couple of times, his budget is so toxic that Romney ran away from it on the same day that he picked him – and both of Plutocrats R Us have very thin skins. I think that it’s fairly easy to divide and conquer Romney and Ryan, provided we keep calm and drive the knife home when we have the chance.