In the little reading I have been able to do since the announcement this morning, he appears to me to bring nothing to attract any of the folks who voted for Obama in the last election, and indeed greatly adds to the Dems ability to claim that the Republicans are callous, don't care about the poor, and intend to cast them loose. His position on medicare is going to scare a lot of folks and his tax policy is very easy to interpret as favoring "the rich." He is a practicing Catholic and yet even the conference of catholic bishops is castigating him: "The 2012 Ryan budget also received criticism from elements of the
Catholic Church, specifically from the
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and from faculty and administrators of
Georgetown University. In its letter to Rep. Ryan, the group of Georgetown faculty and administrators criticized the Ryan budget as trying to "to dismantle government programs and abandon the poor to their own devices," going on to say that Catholic teaching "demands that higher levels of government provide help—"subsidium"—when communities and local governments face problems beyond their means to address such as economic crises, high unemployment, endemic poverty and hunger." I fear this is just another case of the Republicans only listening to the base and that will just ensure another four years of Obama, and possibly even help the dems regain control of the house.
Ya'll think that he will be a great debater, but most of the folks that the Republicans have to attract don't have the attention span to really watch the debates. They will instead see a white bread conservative intellectual who neither understands nor cares about the problems of the average guy (which is how he will be portrayed in the little sound-bites that most people will actually see.)