Why Do People Agree to Give SOTU Responses?

My first reaction to the news that Paul Ryan has been designated to give the Republican response to the State of the Union address was to fulminate a bit about the unseriousness of it all. After all, Paul Ryan's written a famous "budget roadmap" that does an excellent job of showing what it takes to balance the budget without raising taxes—massive, massive, massive cuts in Medicare. But since massive Medicare cuts are unpopular, the GOP leadership doesn't want to get behind Ryan's plan for massive Medicare cuts. Indeed, they don't even want to bring it up for a vote. But instead of facing the fact that the GOP is not, in fact, willing to endorse the kind of massive Medicare cuts that are the only way to make their tax policies work, they're going to . . . put Ryan up as their speaker so everyone can pretend there's a plan here.

It's enough to drive a person crazy.

But I'm enjoying a Percocet mellow today, so let's think about a different issue. Is the SOTU response gig anything other than a quick way to trip up a rising star in one's party? The Bobby Jindal experience is the most vivid cautionary tale, but he's hardly alone. The vast majority of people given this task do a bad job of it. And even those who do well, like Jim Webb, don't accrue much in the way of anything in the way of real benefit.