Over at Greg's, I continue the conversation from yesterday over Democrats elevating Rep. Paul Ryan's domestic agenda and his response to the State of the Union last night:
While governing by poll numbers alone is a bad idea, by avoiding precisely the kind of specifics in his response that made conservatives excited about his Roadmap in the first place, Ryan was basically conceding the point. While Republicans like to argue that Americans are instinctively conservative and really want to dismantle the social safety net, that case is harder to make if someone like Ryan avoids making a detailed case for doing so when everyone's watching precisely because it could cost Republicans politically.
It's a pretty consistent rule of thumb in politics that once you start talking about specifics, people start liking what you have to say less precisely because it becomes easier to raise objections. That's why Republicans avoided unveiling an agenda before the midterms until the last minute.
But Republicans use generalities about spending to draw really broad conclusions about the ideological composition of the electorate and Americans' "inherent conservatism," and those arguments are worth shooting down. Americans may tend to identify as conservative more than they identify as liberal, but when it comes to specifics, American voters tend to be pretty incoherent ideologically.
