Sally Cohn, from Fox News, put together an excellent piece analyzing the speech given by Paul Ryan at the Republican National Convention. She used three words to describe his speech; dazzling, deceiving and distracting.
Ryan was able to come across incredibly well during his speech when it comes to personality. He delivered his speech with a personal touch to the point where many could probably picture themselves having a chat with him while waiting for their children to come out of school. Ryan did what Mitt Romney has not been able to do so far; struggling to connect with voters on a personal level. Ryan, simply put, dazzled with his speech.
When you dig deeper into his speech, you come across the word deceiving. Ryan told lie after lie during his speech, some of which are outlined in this post. Ryan tried to blame the United States’ credit rating decrease on spending under the Obama administration. In fact, the rating was dropped because the Republicans said that they were not going to raise the ceiling for debt.
Another lie told by Ryan was that the GM plant closure in Janesville, Wisconsin was closed by President Obama. In fact, the plant was closed when George W. Bush was in office.
Now we arrive at the third word, distracting. He failed to discuss his position on making all abortions illegal, including no exceptions for incest or rape. He also failed to discuss his plan for Wall Street to take over the operation of Social Security. Ryan did not touch on the votes he made in favor of raising spending and balloon the deficit when Bush was the president.
All in all, Ryan greatly helped the Romney campaign by proving to be an incredibly likable personality in the race. What he did do was further hurt the campaign by lying blatantly about true facts and hiding from his own record.