Ryan came off as…earnest.

“It’s nice to be in a room full of conservatives for a change.”

As you’d expect, it’s about budgets, and it does to Patty Murray (without saying her name) what Ted Cruz did to Dianne Feinstein. The Democrats’ budget is horrid, and Ryan calls them out for it.

He touts his own, though as we’ve already discussed he doesn’t quite go as far as he should as an opening bid. But what the speech is really about is why the federal government has got to balance the budget not just as an ideological exercise but as a matter of economic survival.

Tim Scott’s speech was about more hopeful subjects. As the country gets to know this guy he’s destined to be a tremendously popular national figure. Don’t be surprised if Scott ends up supplanting Colin Powell as the African-American Republican nobody can say anything negative about (but not for the same reasons Powell attained that status). It’s hard to hack a guy to pieces who comes off as such a genuinely good person.