Ryan pulled out the audiovisual aids — flashing charts from his friends at the Heritage Foundation on a big screen — until people in the crowd shouted to him that they did not come for a picture show. He tried partisanship, suggesting that President Obama wasn’t taking budget issues seriously. He tried pandering, pointing to crews from national television networks and saying: “Let’s show them that Wisconsinites can be cordial to one another.”

So it went for Paul Ryan, the salesman for the Republican plan that may be selling in Washington — at least to Republicans — but is earning a thumbs down from his constituents in Wisconsin. Likewise, voters in other states have also been rejecting the plan at increasingly contentious town hall meetings of Republican members of Congress.

It may be true that congressmen can fool some of the people some of the time. But, for Ryan, the further he gets from Washington — where he has spent almost half his life as a congressional aide, conservative “think tank” staffer and member of the House — the harder it has been for the budget committee chairman to find buyers for his schemes. Not only does he want to restructure Medicare and Medicaid in order to shift money away from patient care and into the coffers of insurance companies, he also wants to gamble the retirement security of Americans with his campaign donors on Wall Street and to give more tax cuts to the rich, more tax breaks to the corporations, and more goodies to the bankers he served when he led the charge to get GOP votes for the 2008 bailout.