So we saw Tuesday night the unveiling of the “new” Republican Party at the Jack Kemp Foundation dinner. The two young stars spoke, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio. Politico gave it a big write up, noting how many times Ryan mentioned the word “poverty” and how many times Rubio said “middle class.” One can see already that the media is going to hype these two and their supposed new thinking relentlessly. Is there anything to the hype? Of course not, and the reason is simple. Neither they nor the people they’re talking to are ready to accept that they’ve been wrong about anything except messaging, and until they are, this is just gaseous rhetoric.

The rhetoric, I admit, they’ve got down. No 53 percenters, these two! They love everybody. The GOP, Ryan said in his speech, knows how to talk to the “risk-takers.” But unlike Mitt Romney, he sees that “there is another part of the American creed: when our neighbors are struggling, we look out for one another. We do that best through our families and communities—and our party must stand for making them stronger. We have a compassionate vision based on ideas that work—but sometimes we don’t do a good job of laying out that vision. We need to do better.