Interesting observation from The American Conservative, where Daniel Larison admits that the case Clinton made against Romney and Ryan was devastating —

… it was all the more devastating because Romney and Ryan made no concerted effort to make the case for their ticket and their agenda last week. … Part of what made Clinton’s speech so devastating is that he compiled all of these objections, linked them together, and presented them to a large television audience all at once in a way that was easily digestible.

Another reason the speech was so devastating to them was that he gave the sort of speech that Ryanmaniacs might have once imagined that Ryan would deliver and the sort that some Romney supporters still imagine Romney is capable of giving. Romney-Ryan was supposed to be the presidential ticket of the “data-driven” manager and his budget wonk sidekick, and between the absence of any significant policy discussion last week and what happened tonight that has lost all credibility. Clinton outperformed both of them in terms of discussing policy details, and underscored just how meaningless the “campaign of ideas” phrase has been. Ryan fans had been convinced for over a year that the election had to be a contest over “big ideas,” and when it came time to engage in that contest their party leaders didn’t even try.

There are several possible reasons they didn’t even try. It might be that they do have a substantive argument for themselves tucked away somewhere, and they haven’t trotted it out because they think the electorate is bored with that detail stuff. I get that vibe from a lot of the Right, actually; they just want the red meat, not the wonky vegetables.

So instead, the GOP decided to package Romney as a swell guy who can be trusted to take care of things, and you don’t need to worry your pretty little head how he’s going to do it. That approach also assumes that people are so disappointed with Barack Obama that no one has to make a substantive pitch about why Romney would be better. They think the electorate is so desperate to find an alternative they’ll vote for anybody who has a nice family and looks good in a suit.

If that’s the case, IMO it’s a miscalculation. A lot of people probably would consider voting for someone else, but not necessarily ANYBODY else.

Or, maybe Romney and Ryan are saving the juicy details for the debates. They aren’t trotting them out beforehand because they don’t want to give the Dems time to craft counterarguments. In which case, maybe those arguments aren’t all that solid.

Another possibility is that they have a substantive argument, but they are keeping it hidden because they know most of the electorate would run away screaming if they knew what it was. (Along those lines, do read Tom Levenson, “Visions of the Apocalypse: Not in Fire, Nor in Ice, But in the Emptying Beds of a Nursing Home.”)

Or, maybe they don’t have a substantive argument, just a facsimile of one. Ryan’s budget possibly seemed brilliant to a lot of journalists who briefly looked at it — I assume it has, like, numbers and stuff — but the few knowledgeable people who actually studied the thing generally have been aghast at how flimsy it is. Krugman has been calling it a “fantasy.”

This takes us to two sets of sub-possibilities — I should be diagramming this — one, they honestly didn’t understand their calculations were hallucinatory; or two, they knew all along the calculations were hallucinatory and didn’t think anyone (but a few liberal wonks) would notice.

If we go with sub-possibility one — I can easily imagine that Ryan has such faith in his ideology that he didn’t think he had to make all the numbers crunch; his ideas are just so self-evidently true (to him). However, if he still thinks that, I don’t know why he would be shy about defending his ideas. Possibly someone recently got through to him that his grand ideas really are not defensible. Drag them out of the Fairy Castle of True Belief and they melt into a pathetic little puddle.

And, finally, maybe they’ve both been faking it. In which case the debates will be fun.

Update: Another possibility, from Ed Kilgore:

Larison’s analysis strengthens my growing belief that in choosing Ryan as a running-mate, Romney had zero intention of making a robust defense of the Ryan Budget or pursuing anything else the conservative movement was panting for him to say or do (other than the racially-tinged demagoguery about welfare). It was precisely the opposite: he figured he could shut up the noisy ideologues by offering them the symbolic prize of Ryan and then running his campaign in exactly the non-substantive way he always intended. This end-the-primaries strategy, as I’ve called it earlier, depended, of course, on swing-voter ignorance about Ryan and indeed the entire GOP agenda, and on Democratic complicity in a campaign about pre-set cartoon caricatures rather than anything that might look like an “idea.”

Plausible. And if that’s the case, it’s also plausible Romney will shift and allow Ryan more leeway to make a case for his ideas. But his ideas are nuts — see above about the Fairy Castle. And if that’s what Romney thought he got very bad advice from somebody (Karl Rove?).