From
The Washington Post's Scott Wilson and Philip Rucker
2012 post-mortem:
As part of his role, Ryan had wanted to talk about poverty, traveling to inner cities and giving speeches that laid out the Republican vision for individual empowerment. But Romney advisers refused his request to do so, until mid-October, when he gave a speech on civil society in Cleveland.
As one adviser put it, “The issues that we really test well on and win on are not the war on poverty.”
So instead of letting Ryan position himself as the second coming of Jack Kemp, the Romney campaign sent him to a soup kitchen to wash clean dishes. Brilliant.