Michael Gerson notices that the Democrats wasted little time savaging Rep. Paul Ryan just a week after Obama called for bipartisan civility. That should be no surprise to those who have kept an eye on the president’s now-familiar pattern of singing the praises of civility before knocking his critics. (”Obama’s outreach to Republicans has been a ploy, which is to say, a deception. Once again, a president so impressed by his own idealism has become the nation’s main manufacturer of public cynicism.”) Gerson notes that Ryan offers a serious alternative to endless deficits and government dependency:

Over time, Ryan concentrates government spending on the poor through means-tested programs, patching holes in the safety net while making entitlements more sustainable. He saves money by providing the middle class with defined-contribution benefits — private retirement accounts and health vouchers — that are more portable but less generous in the long run. And he expects a growing economy, liberated from debt and inflation, to provide more real gains for middle-class citizens than they lose from lower government benefits. Ryanism is not only a technical solution to endless deficits; it represents an alternative political philosophy.

You can understand why the Obami, who lack a single innovative domestic-policy idea, really don’t want to debate Ryan on the merits. Instead, Obama offers condescension (dubbing Ryan a “sincere guy”) or unleashes his attack dogs at the DNC to snarl that Ryan is all about “a vicious, voucherizing, privatizing assault on Social Security, Medicare and every non-millionaire American,” as Gerson summarizes. Obama was supposed to be the ideas man — after all, he has Ivy League degrees, has published books, and speaks so well. And yet, where is his interesting blueprint for reforming entitlements? Well, he couldn’t even manage his own ObamaCare plan, so I suppose he isn’t into the details so much. Rather he’s in the bait-and-switch business — running as a moderate and governing as a liberal, urging bipartisanship and snapping at the opposition, and calling for fiscal sobriety but propounding an embarrassing budget. He is the un-Ryan — that is, unserious and uninteresting. Like ideology (according to Hillary Clinton), he seems so yesterday.

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