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Today the best House Speaker of modern times reclaims the gavel from the worst. Paul Ryan leaves office with 12%, that's right, 12% favorability -- and 75% unfavorable 1/ 
Whatever happened to the days when Ryan was a media darling, receiving constant praise for his seriousness and honesty? I've talked a lot about how his phoniness was obvious from the beginning 2/ nytimes.com/2010/08/06/opi…
What I haven't talked about, I think, is that Ryan-adulation was always a within-the-Beltway thing -- that is, it didn't reflect any kind of broad public perception. On the contrary, ordinary voters always despised him 3/ politico.com/story/2011/06/…
Strange to say, however, you never ever read stories about how unlikable Ryan was. It was all about the wonderful substance of his ideas -- which were, in fact, obviously fraudulent. 4/
Meanwhile, press reports about Pelosi's unlikability were legion -- even though she was viewed no less favorably than most speakers 5/ washingtonpost.com/news/politics/…
What we're seeing here is both sexism and the bias of the news media, which isn't so much partisan as tilted toward politicians who pretend to care about centrist pieties even when they actually treat them with contempt 6/
