Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency

TAMPA, Fla.–An army of fact-checkers swarmed around Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech last night, and the verdict was swift and unanimous: lies, omissions, a sweeping rewrite of recent history. But there’s one question no checker can answer: Why was it necessary to lie in the first place?

Mr. Ryan could have made a sharp critique of the Obama years without changing the underlying facts. That he chose not to do so suggests he isn’t sure the facts are on his side.

Take the GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, which he suggested closed because of President Obama, when it really shut down in 2008, before he took office. More importantly, he failed to mention that the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry saved most of the GM plants and hundreds of thousands of jobs.



If Mr. Ryan is opposed to a government bailout of private industry, as Mitt Romney was, why not stand up at the podium and forcefully make the case against it? The outlines of that argument are well-known – the bailout subsidizes the unions, it picks favorites, it distorts the free market, etc. Forget factual dishonesty; failing to even bring up the matter commits the deeper sin of intellectual dishonesty.

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The reason, of course, is that the bailout is broadly popular among blue-collar workers in many of the swing states the Republican ticket needs to win, including Mr. Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin. Thus intellectual dishonesty is compounded by cowardice.

Mr. Ryan accused the president of creating a bipartisan debt commission and then ignoring its recommendations, failing to mention that he himself voted against the commission’s report. So why not explain that vote? He could have won cheers from the convention crowd by explaining that the ticket, as well as Republican leaders, are against any deficit-reduction compromise that requires raising taxes on anyone, including the rich, as the Simpson-Bowles report suggested and, separately, President Obama has urged.

But that might alienate a broader national audience, which polls have consistently found favors higher taxes on the rich, and wants leaders to compromise. And so it was left out.

The worst omission of all is that Mr. Ryan didn’t defend the Medicare restructuring proposal for which he is best known, which has also been embraced by Mr. Romney. Does Mr. Ryan still believe that Medicare should be turned into a voucher system? He hasn’t said otherwise, yet in the biggest speech of his life, the one the world was watching, he said nothing about what he wants to do. (Unless you count the vague assurance that he would “protect and strengthen” the program). Instead he accused Mr. Obama of taking money from Medicare, while neglecting to mention that he proposed the same cuts in his own budget, or that his voucher plan would reduce the program’s scope.

With a few tweaks and a little more courage, Mr. Ryan could have made a speech that wouldn’t set off truth-meters and might have explained the foundations of the party’s thinking. The only conclusion to draw is that he really doesn’t want the public to know what he’s thinking.