The Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning:

If there’s a Laffer Curve for Presidential invective—some point at which dishonest political abuse yields diminishing returns—the White House political team must not think their boss has hit it. Even in this hyperpartisan age, President Obama’s speech to the Associated Press yesterday was a parody of the form. This was a diatribe that managed to invoke “Social Darwinism” and “a Trojan Horse” in the same paragraph, amid the other high crimes that Mr. Obama says Paul Ryan wants to commit.
The President’s depiction of the wonkish and formerly obscure House Budget Chairman as some political monster is itself telling. Mr. Obama is conceding that he can’t run on the economic recovery, the stimulus, health care, green energy or any of the other grand liberal ambitions that have dominated his time in office. All of those are unpopular or failures. He was elected on hope and change, but now his only hope is to change the subject to the ogres he claims are the disloyal opposition.

In a memo last week, Patrick Shortridge, chairman of the Minnesota GOP, who has advised Ryan, made the political case for the Ryan plan:

Fretting over Paul Ryan’s efforts to actually control spending, save Medicare, and prevent America’s economic decline, they suggest Republicans would be better off pursuing a course of…what exactly?
The tone of the Presidential campaign hasn’t exactly inspired confidence or enthusiasm among Republican voters or helped attract the independent voters we’ll need to win the general election. Just the opposite, in fact.
Many of these Republican strategists argue for delaying any action on the looming fiscal train wreck until (1) after the election (2) until after the 2014 midterm, because you know this is complicated (3) until after we have 60 votes in the Senate (4) until after we’ve had the national “Going Out of Business Sale.”
They remind one of St Augustine’s famous plea from his Confessions, “give me chastity and continence, but not just now.”
In fact, voters are looking for solutions to the national crisis, not another generation of politicians playing games. Do these consultants think we’d be better off politically if we pulled a Harry Reid and went over three years without even bothering to produce a budget? Do they think Americans are angry with Washington because too much is being done to halt the fiscal crisis rather than too little?
In a recent survey of Florida Republican Primary voters, a place with more than a few seniors, two questions on the Path to Prosperity polled at 74-6, while the Balanced Budget Amendment polled at only 73-7.
In 2010 Florida general election polling on Social Security and Medicare, changes similar to those in the Path to Prosperity were very popular with voters. In fact, 65% supported reforming Medicare along the lines of the outlined in the Path, giving seniors the same kind of health plan choices as members of Congress.
We have reached the point where divided government that allows us to merely stop bad things from happening isn’t enough. Liberals don’t need to pass any new legislation; they just need to keep in place what’s already been done and stop any GOP efforts to reform government and cut spending.
Republicans must continue to lay the groundwork for our reforms. If we don’t, the same “strategists” will be back in January of 2013 claiming the GOP didn’t run on the Path to Prosperity in 2012 and it’s an “overreach” to now spring this agenda on the American people after they never even campaigned on it, and so on.
In fact, if our Presidential candidates were talking about big ideas like the Path instead of distractions (contraception) or what they’re not (Obama), they’d be in much better shape.
Republicans do best when they embrace bold solutions and confront big issues head on. The same mindset urging Republicans to run away from solutions to the budget crisis led an earlier generation of consultants to attack the Contract with America. They, too, preferred content free campaigns rather than real contrasts of ideas.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan succeeded wildly by offering bold solutions for the issues of the day: the failing US economy, Soviet expansionism, American decline. Today, as national bankruptcy looms and a borrowing orgy threatens the things that make American unique, we can offer nothing less.
The Path to Prosperity accomplishes this, while also offering the path to political victory, provided we’re bold enough to take it.

He sure seems to have a point here. I would like to think that an attempt at good stewardship should have some political advantage.

If you haven’t read Ryan’s response to the president’s shrill “social Darwinism” speech, you might want to here.