Paul Ryan sent the Wisconsin delegation on the floor of the Republican convention into paroxysms of joy.
Former Governor and Senate candidate Tommy Thompson, who was standing beside me, kept squeezing my arm. "He got to you, didn't he?" Tommy said, leaning over to me after the speech. "Even journalists have a heart. . . . If he got to you, he got to America!"
Ryan was a huge hit. He got off the best, funniest line of the whole convention, when he said twenty-year-olds shouldn't have to live in their childhood bedrooms, staring at fading Obama posters and wondering when their lives were going to start.
He did, in fact, move people to tears with his tribute to his mom, when he choked up as he described her as his role model--how she went back to school and started a new career after her husband's untimely death, transforming herself "from a widow in grief to a small businesswoman whose happiness wasn't just in the past."
But then there was the truly appalling part.
It was breath-taking when Ryan brought up the GM factory that closed in Janesville, and implied that it was all Obama's fault.
Not only did the plant close on George W. Bush's watch, but it did so after union workers pleaded with Ryan to support them and help save their jobs, to no avail.
Ryan's record on trade is a perfect recipe for the destruction of manufacturing in his hard-hit district.
He even opposed extending unemployment insurance, after his constituents lost 30 to 50 percent of the district's manufacturing jobs.
Yet Ryan--a son of privilege and an enemy of labor--painted himself as a working class hero:
"A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that G.M. plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said, ``I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another 100 years.''
That's what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that's how it is in so many towns where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight."
That's a pretty gutsy rhetorical move.
So was Ryan's rhetoric on the Medicare cuts for which he excoriates Obama:
"The biggest, coldest power play of all in Obama Care came at the expense of the elderly," said the architect of Medicare's destruction in the Ryan budget plan.
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