Two quick thoughts about the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's running mate:

[1] It hadn't occurred to me until I read Jim Tankersley's piece in National Journal that this election is now a war between class warfares. Obama wants the class warfare to be the poor and middle class against the rich, and Romney wants it to be the middle class and rich against the poor. I recognize the sense in which this isn't unusual; the middle class is often the contested turf when Republicans battle Democrats. Still, the selection of Ryan would seem to ensure that this war between warfares will be unusually prominent.

[2] Paul Ryan is lauded by conservatives as "the real thing" -- earnest, smart, ideologically committed. But, in terms of sheer visuals and atmospherics, won't he strike many Americans as "the fake thing"? A couple of years ago I was watching him on TV, and one of my daughters, who was then around 15 years old and isn't especially tuned in to party politics, walked into the room and, without having any idea who he was, said, "He looks like he's selling something." They used to say that Al Gore's problem was that he was "wooden." I think Ryan's problem is that he'll strike a lot of people as plastic. He calls to mind a robot I dimly recall from the General Electric "Carousel of Progress," which was a big attraction at Disneyland when I was a kid and presumably has long since perished, possibly because the robot in question was so annoying.