Politics 101
By If NY-26 has taught us anything, it’s that it would take Mark Penn-level incompetence to screw up the political gift that even remotely marginal Republican legislators gave their prospective Democratic opponents by voting for the Ryan plan. It takes similar incompetence not to have understood how unpopular getting rid of Medicare to finance massive upper-class tax cuts would be. So combining Penn and Michael Barone gets us to the sweet spot of utter incompetence.