Klein's assessment of Ryan offers a chuckle

I suppose this is largely a matter of definitional nuance, but I find Ezra Klein's principal assessment of Paul Ryan to be ingratiatingly generous and pathetically Beltwayean: 

[H]e’s smart. This shouldn’t need to be said, but some liberals seem to think Ryan’s intelligence is some kind of facade. In this view, he’s really a robotic Randian who does little more than spout talking points.

Ryan may be smart. I don't know. But I do know that Klein's applied measurement of intelligence--that "He’s sufficiently engaged in the policy conversation that he knows both the arguments for and the arguments against his positions"--is no real measurement at all. Shifty used-car salesmen are abundantly practiced in the art of anticipating objections; they know every one of them and they can seemingly pulverize every one of them, but that's scarcely a sign of raw intelligence.

The used-care salesman, like Ryan, is only one species of the single-minded ideologue. His cerebral universe consists of selling that car. You may not need the car, and in fact buying the car may be the dumbest thing you could possibly do at that moment. However the vigorously ideological salesman will hurl memorized, fabricated reason after memorized, fabricated reason why you should indeed buy the wretched thing, and, assuming you're weak-minded enough and insufficiently self-interested, he'll wear you down.

Before you know it you're bumping along in a cataclysmic wreck of a lemon wondering, Why the hell didn't I stay with what I had?

And your principal, one-word assessment of that slithering salesman probably won't be, Wow, he was smart.

Comments

[AnneJ]

I've worked at car dealerships and have been around car salesmen. Paul Ryan drips of sleaze like it actually oozes out of his pores and if you were to meet him in person, you'd probably be able to smell it. A good salesman knows how to cover up their sleaziness, something that Paul Ryan does not seem to be capable of doing.

[Jim Milstein]

I think a good rule of thumb is that anyone who has escaped adolescence and yet actively admires the work and thought of Ayn Rand is not smart.

Slack is given to those who haven't thought of Rand since their teens and do not actually remember what it was they admired.

Slack is not given to those who require their employees to read the stuff.

[majii]

Excuse me, PM, but I must speak frankly. The time for politeness has passed where Romney/Ryan, their lies, and their lying, despicable supporters are concerned. IMO, Ezra Klein is a f*cking fool who straddles the fence between telling the unvarnished truth and promoting the fallacies cooked up in his fevered brain that he uses to protect his access to people like Paul Ryan. He is too much of a coward for my tastes when it comes to fulfilling his role as a journalist. One can be intelligent and an habitual liar--the two aren't mutually exclusive. BS like this is why I don't pay much attention to anything Ezra Klein says/writes. He may fool some, but I refuse to allow him to tell me Ryan's sh*t doesn't stink when I see it and smell it all over the place.