I've already linked to Krugman three times in my "primer", but here's Krugman again (who better to go to when evaluating a guy whose main accomplishment is a budget proposal than an economist?).

In this one, he's reacting to pundits reacting to Ryan. And the main point is that Ryan is good at exploiting the fact that pundits like looking bi-partisan, finding a politician on the right and the left and pretending that each candidate is serious and proposing plans with merit. And as Krugman and others have shown, that just isn't the case with Ryan. His "serious" budget is mostly smoke and mirrors. But most pundits are pretty lazy and don't have the backgrounds to understand this stuff anyway, so the fact that Ryan has a bunch of stuff written down is all it takes to hoodwink them.