I enjoyed Virginia Postrel’s take on why Paul Ryan should channel Ross Perot.
In a related vein, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler’s “Opening the Political Mind” offers some limited evidence that graphical information is effective at getting people to reduce their resistance to counter-attitudinal information. That is, if you want to change people’s minds, graphs and charts might be more effective than words alone. I sense that the word is out about this phenomenon, and that it is being used and abused. But that is another matter entirely.