Rep. Paul Ryan Gets the Nod For the SOTU Response

Dave Weigel snarks the announcement:

Mike Allen scoops that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the new Budget Committee chairman, will give the response to the State of the Union. That's a smart and surprising choice. The GOP has a new crop of non-white statewide electeds who could have been tapped, and new African-American and Hispanic members of Congress. That was the direction they went for the 1997 and 2009 responses. They have a new crop of governors like John Kasich and Rick Scott and (less new) Chris Christie, who can make that hoariest of SOTU responses, "if America copied my state it'd be better off."

But it's Paul Ryan, the man with the deep-cutting Blueprint that Democrats utterly failed to use against Republicans in 2010; the man whose budget recommendations were deemed passed at the start of this Congress, to another vacuum of liberal outrage.

The SOTU response is a terribly difficult job. While the president has a roomful of people to respond to his speech, the response from the out-of-power party is made to a camera with no audience to play off of.  Good public speakers like Bobby Jindal have not performed well when they only had a camera to talk to.

President Bush was a classic example.  He was great in front of a crowd when he could feed off their energy and use his great timing for the punchlines.  However, put him in front of just a camera and it was "deer in the headlights" time.  Televised oval office addresses were never as successful as his public events.

Personally, I would have liked to see Chris Christie get this job.  He's a powerful speaker and can deliver his ideas with the best of them.  I'm not sure Ryan, despite his obvious intellect and conservative policies, can deliver a speech that will hold the audience.