One day in March, 2009, two
months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul
Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space
in his Capitol Hill office. Hunched forward in his chair, he rattled off
well-rehearsed critiques of the new President’s policies and America’s
lurch toward a “European” style of government. Ryan’s father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather all died before their sixtieth
birthdays, so Ryan, who is now forty-two, could be forgiven if he seemed
like a man in a hurry. Tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair, he
is nearly as well known in Washington for his punishing early-morning
workouts as he is for his mastery of the federal budget. Asked to
explain his opposition to Obama’s newly released budget, he replied, “I
don’t have that much time.”
Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age
of twenty-eight. Like many young conservatives, he is embarrassed by the
Bush years. At the time, as a junior member with little clout, Ryan was
a reliable Republican vote for policies that were key in causing
enormous federal budget deficits: sweeping tax cuts, a costly
prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare, two wars, the
multibillion-dollar bank-bailout legislation known as
TARP.
In all, five trillion dollars was added to the national debt. In 2006
and 2008, many of Ryan’s older Republican colleagues were thrown out of
office as a result of lobbying scandals and overspending. Ryan told me
recently that, as a fiscal conservative, he was “miserable during the
last majority” and is determined “to do everything I can to make sure I
don’t feel that misery again.”
In 2009, Ryan was striving to
reintroduce himself as someone true to his ideological roots and capable
of reversing his party’s reputation for fiscal profligacy. A generation
of Republican leaders was gone. Ryan had already jumped ahead of more
senior colleagues to become the top Republican on the House Budget
Committee, and it was his job to pick apart Obama’s tax and spending
plans. At the table in his office, Ryan pointed out the gimmicks that
Presidents use to hide costs and conceal policy details. He
deconstructed Obama’s early health-care proposal and attacked his
climate-change plan. Obama’s budget “makes our tax code much less
competitive,” he said, as if reading from a script. “It makes it harder
for businesses to survive in the global economy, for people to save for
their own retirement, and it grows our debt tremendously.” He added, “It
just takes the poor trajectory our country’s fiscal state is on and
exacerbates it.”
As much as he relished the battle against Obama—“
European,”
he repeated, with some gusto—his real fight was for the ideological
identity of the Republican Party, and with colleagues who were content
to simply criticize the White House. “If you’re going to criticize, then
you should propose,” he told me. A fault line divided the older and
more cautious Republican leaders from the younger, more ideological
members. Ryan was, and remains, the leader of the attack-and-propose
faction.
“I
think you’re obligated to do that,” he said. “People like me who are
reform-minded ignore the people who say, ‘Just criticize and don’t do
anything and let’s win by default.’ That’s ridiculous.” He said he was
“moving ahead without them. They don’t want to produce alternatives?
That’s not going to stop me from producing an alternative.”
Ryan’s
long-range plan was straightforward: to create a detailed alternative
to Obama’s budget and persuade his party to embrace it. He would start
in 2009 and 2010 with House Republicans, the most conservative bloc in
the Party. Then, in the months before the Presidential primaries, he
would focus on the G.O.P. candidates. If the plan worked, by the fall of
2012 Obama’s opponent would be running on Paul Ryan’s ideas, and in
2013 a new Republican President would be signing them into law.
Sitting
in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen
how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be.
Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has
rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and
the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan.
Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on
Ryan and his ideas. “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan,” Mitt
Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while
campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, “I think it’d be marvellous if the
Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budget and adopt it and pass it along
to the President.”
To envisage what Republicans would do if they
win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney,
who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to
understand is Paul Ryan.
Janesville, Wisconsin,
where Ryan was born and still lives, is a riverfront city of sixty-four
thousand people in the southeast corner of the state, between Madison
and Chicago. Three families, the Ryans, the Fitzgeralds, and the
Cullens, sometimes called the Irish Mafia, helped develop the town,
especially in the postwar era. The Ryans were major road builders, and
today Ryan, Inc., started in 1884 by Paul’s great-grandfather, is a
national construction firm. The historic Courthouse section of
Janesville is still thick with members of the Ryan clan. At last count,
there were eight other Ryan households within a six-block radius of his
house, a large Georgian Revival with six bedrooms and eight bathrooms
that is on the National Register of Historic Places.
“I grew up on
the block I now live on,” Ryan told me recently. We were sitting in his
new, more spacious Capitol Hill office, one of the spoils of being in
the majority after the 2010 elections. “My aunt and uncle live across
the street from me,” he said. “My cousin is next door, my brother is a
block away.” Ryan’s line of the family strayed from the construction
business, which is now run by his cousin Adam. His grandfather and
father became lawyers instead.
Unlike most members of Congress
these days, Ryan is relatively accessible to reporters. “The key to
understanding me is really simple,” he said. “I am not trying to be
anybody other than who I actually am.” Even his ideological foes comment
on his friendliness and good nature. After his sophomore year in high
school, back in 1986, he worked the grill at McDonald’s. “The manager
didn’t think I had the social skills to work the counter,” he said. “And
now I’m in Congress!”
But the summer of 1986 brought a
life-changing event. One night in August, he came home from work well
past midnight, and he slept late the following morning. His mother was
in Colorado visiting his sister, and his brother, who had a summer job
with the Janesville parks department, had left early. Paul answered a
frantic phone call from his father’s secretary. “Your dad’s got clients
in here,” she said. “Where is he?” Paul walked into his parents’ bedroom
and thought his father was sleeping. “I went to wake him up,” he told
me, “and he was dead.”
“It was just a big punch in the gut,” Ryan
said. “I concluded I’ve got to either sink or swim in life.” His mother
went back to school, in Madison, and studied interior design; his
grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, moved into their home, and
Ryan helped care for her. “I grew up really fast,” he said.
He
took both schoolwork and extracurricular activities more seriously, he
told me. In his junior year, he was elected class president, which made
him prom king and gave him a seat representing the high school on
Janesville’s school board, his first political position. He played
soccer and was on the ski team. He joined nearly every school club:
Latin Club, History Club, the Letterman’s Club, for varsity athletes,
and the International Geographic Society, which was open to students who
received an A in geography, and which met monthly to learn about a
different country. At the end of his senior year, he was elected Biggest
Brown-Noser. (“At least I didn’t have a mullet,” he said.)
His
father’s death also provoked the kind of existential soul-searching that
most kids don’t undertake until college. “I was, like, ‘What is the
meaning?’ ” he said. “I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection.
I read everything I could get my hands on.” Like many conservatives, he
claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading
“Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this
economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating
indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.”
He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.
In
a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society,
Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and
interns. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I
had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told
the group. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a
fight of individualism versus collectivism.” To me he was careful to
point out that he rejects Rand’s atheism.
In 1988, Ryan went to
Miami University, in Ohio, where he got to know an economics professor
named William R. Hart, a fierce and outspoken libertarian in a faculty
dominated by liberals. The two quickly discovered their shared
fascination with Rand and Hayek. Ryan got his first introduction to
movement conservatism when Hart handed him an issue of
National Review. “Take this magazine—I think you’ll like it,” he said.
In
1991, Hart recommended Ryan for an internship in the office of Senator
Bob Kasten, a Wisconsin Republican. Two years later, Ryan went to work
as a speechwriter and policy analyst for Jack Kemp, who led Empower
America, an organization then in the vanguard of making policy for
supply-side conservatives who were pushing Republicans rightward in
their views on taxes and the size of government. “Jack Kemp is what
sucked me into public policy, public service, and politics,” Ryan said.
“He called it the battle of ideas, and I just really got into it.”
Hart told me, “He thought the world of Jack Kemp. I got the impression that Jack Kemp became something of a second father.”
In
1997, Mark Neumann, the congressman from Ryan’s district in Wisconsin,
who was running for the Senate, called Ryan, who was just twenty-seven,
and suggested that he run for the House seat. Neumann knew that the
popular Ryan name couldn’t hurt. Ryan went back to Wisconsin, worked
briefly for the family business as a “marketing consultant”—a bit of
résumé padding that gave him his only private-sector experience—and
decided to run. One ad showed him walking through a Janesville cemetery
among the gravestones of his ancestors. He won the election, becoming
the second-youngest member of the House, and he has been reëlected
easily ever since.
Ryan’s first significant policy fight came in
2004. As President George W. Bush campaigned for a second term, largely
emphasizing counter-terrorism and national-security policies, Ryan laid
the groundwork for the Republican agenda should Bush be elected. For the
first time, Ryan had the chance to pursue some of the more daring
libertarian ideas that had captivated him. As a thirty-four-year-old
representative, he set out to privatize Social Security.
For
decades, policy wonks on the Republican fringes had talked about turning
Social Security, the government safety-net program for retirees, into a
system of private investment accounts. The architect of the movement
was Peter Ferrara, a former Harvard Law School student, who, calling it
“the craziest idea in the world,” sold it, in 1979, to the
small-government fundamentalists at the Cato Institute. (Ferrara is now
at the Heartland Institute, best known for its denial of climate
change.) They evangelized on behalf of the idea for more than two
decades, before pushing it into mainstream Republican politics. Bush was
the first Republican Presidential nominee to embrace the idea, but it
wasn’t a priority in his first term, which was dominated by the response
to 9/11 and the war in Iraq.
Ryan and other conservative leaders,
among them Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, wanted to be sure
that Bush returned to the plan in 2005. Under Ryan’s initial version,
American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll
taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to
reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one
part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two
trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological
statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the
federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear.
The release of the
Social Security proposal was a turning point in Ryan’s career. Bush
could have chosen to push a bipartisan idea, such as immigration reform,
as the first domestic proposal of his second term. But, during the 2004
campaign, Ryan, with such allies as Kemp and Ferrara, kept up pressure
from the right to force the White House to make a decision on Social
Security. Many Republicans were still wary. Two weeks after Bush’s
Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security
was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his
district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to
document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct
policy issue and live to tell about it.
Conservative editorialists
and activists cheered him on. “What Ryan and Sununu have proposed is
historic,” Newt Gingrich wrote in an op-ed piece. “They have fashioned a
plan that makes the idea of a personal-account option for Social
Security not only politically viable but, indeed, politically
irresistible.” Jack Kemp lauded his former aide: “It will be proven the
most efficacious of all the reforms.” For the first time, Ryan enjoyed a
round of worshipful media coverage. “
THAT HAIR, THOSE EYES, THAT PLAN,” proclaimed the headline of a long home-state magazine profile in 2005.
But
Ryan’s assurances proved to be wildly optimistic. Bush, urged by Karl
Rove to keep his distance from Ryan’s plan, released a far more cautious
proposal, with smaller accounts and less expensive transition costs. He
spent months on a national tour promoting it, as Ryan had in Wisconsin.
Democrats savaged the plan. Bush’s poll numbers sank, and the plan was
effectively dead by the fall. The following year, the Republicans lost
thirty House seats and the Democrats took over Congress. Other factors
contributed to Bush’s failures in 2005 and 2006—Hurricane Katrina,
escalating violence in Iraq—but his push for a version of the Ryan
Social Security plan marked the start of the decline. Bush, in his
memoir, writes that he regretted pursuing the issue when he did.
What
some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted
was mostly a communications problem. “The Administration did a bad job
of selling it,” he told me. Bush had campaigned on national-security
issues, only to pitch Social Security reform after reëlection. “And . . .
thud,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to prepare the country for these
things. You can’t just spring it on them after you win.” The lesson:
“Don’t let the engineers run the marketing department.”
Although
the ranks of House Republicans were thinner after the 2006 elections,
Ryan was sent back to Washington and won the top Republican spot on the
Budget Committee. Now he had a large staff of economists working for him
and access to the resources of the Congressional Budget Office, which
could provide detailed analyses of his proposals. Once again, he set
about testing the bounds of conservative ideology within the Party. It
was his job to draft an alternative to the new Democratic majority’s
budget. Even for the smaller, more conservative G.O.P. caucus of 2007,
Ryan’s draft was so extreme that forty out of two hundred and two
Republicans voted against it.
He returned the following year with
something more polished and more ambitious. In May, 2008, working with
two other young Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, of California, and Eric
Cantor, of Virginia, who had watched the immolation of the congressional
wing of their party during the Bush years, Ryan remade his budget into
something he called the Roadmap for America’s Future. Rather than just
build support inside Congress, he promoted the Roadmap through the rich
network of conservative media and think tanks that helped influence
Republican members. “I thought fiscal policy was on the wrong path,” he
told me.
Ryan had witnessed three periods when conservatism was
ascendant: during the Reagan revolution of the nineteen-eighties; after
the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress; and after Bush’s election in
2000. Notably, the federal government’s size and responsibilities grew
through all three political epochs. Ryan’s Roadmap soon came to define a
fourth conservative surge. Unlike the 1994 Contract with America, which
in substance was not nearly as ideological as people thought, and
unlike Bush’s compassionate conservatism, which was sold as a rejection
of anti-government philosophy, the Roadmap was a comprehensive plan to
reduce the welfare state and radically curtail the government’s role in
protecting citizens from life’s misfortunes.
Ryan recommended
ending Medicare, the government health-insurance program for retirees,
and replacing it with a system of direct payments to seniors, who could
then buy private insurance. (The change would not affect current
beneficiaries or the next decade of new ones.) He proposed ending
Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor, and replacing it with a
lump sum for states to use as they saw fit. Ryan also called for an end
to the special tax break given to employers who provide insurance;
instead, that money would pay for twenty-five-hundred-dollar credits for
uninsured taxpayers to buy their own plans. As for Social Security,
Ryan modestly scaled back his original proposal by reducing the amount
invested in private accounts, from one-half to one-third of payroll
taxes. Ryan’s Roadmap also promised to cut other government spending,
though it didn’t specify how. Likewise, it promised to lower income-tax
rates and simplify the tax code, but it didn’t detail which popular
deductions—mortgage interest? retirement contributions?—it would
eliminate.
Conservative intellectuals at
National Review and
the Heritage Foundation loved the Roadmap, and Ryan became an icon
within the insular world of right-wing pundits. In Congress, things were
different. In 2008, with midterm and Presidential elections looming,
the Roadmap attracted just eight co-sponsors. Only the most astute
observers of G.O.P. internal politics noticed what was happening. In a
celebratory column about the Ryan plan in the Washington
Post,
titled “Fiscal Medicine Man,” Robert Novak, the late conservative
writer, predicted, “After what is expected to be another bad G.O.P.
defeat in the 2008 congressional elections, Ryan, McCarthy, and Cantor
could constitute the party’s new House leadership.”
By early 2009,
when I first met Ryan in his office, he was caught between the demands
of the Republican leaders, who wanted nothing to do with his Roadmap,
and his own belief that the Party had to offer a sweeping alternative
vision to Obama’s. Ryan soon had an unlikely ally, in Obama himself.
Throughout that year, the Administration struggled to defend its
ambitious agenda, in part because there was no Republican alternative
for the President to attack. Ryan, deferring to the Party leadership,
didn’t aggressively push his plan again. But in late January of 2010, a
week after the victory of the Republican Scott Brown in the contest for
Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts—the first election fuelled by
the new Tea Party movement—Ryan offered the Roadmap as an alternative
to Obama’s budget.
He presented it not as a dry policy plan, with
just numbers and actuarial tables, but as a manifesto that drew on the
canon of Western political philosophy as interpreted by conservative
intellectuals. The document’s introduction referred to the Declaration
of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Hayek,
Friedman, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, John Locke, Alexis de
Tocqueville, Georges-Eugène Sorel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles
Murray, and Niall Ferguson. Ryan himself seemed intent on entering the
canon. “Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest
extent possible, can one ever be free,” he wrote, “and only a free
person can make responsible choices—between right and wrong, saving and
spending, giving or taking.”
Obama saw an opening. Invited to
speak before the House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, on
January 29th, he seemed to extend an olive branch to Ryan. “I think
Paul, for example, the head of the Budget Committee, has looked at the
budget and has made a serious proposal,” Obama said. “I’ve read it. I
can tell you what’s in it. And there’s some ideas in there that I would
agree with, but there’s some ideas that we should have a healthy debate
about, because I don’t agree with them.” Afterward, Obama made a point
of shaking Ryan’s hand and signing an autograph for his seven-year-old
daughter, Liza. There was talk in Washington that the two young, wonky
Midwesterners might be able to build a working relationship.
Three
days later, the White House started a livelier debate with Ryan. In a
press briefing, Peter Orszag, the budget director at the time,
dismantled Ryan’s plan, point by point. Ryan’s proposal would turn
Medicare “into a voucher program, so that individuals are on their own
in the health-care market,” he said. Over time, the program wouldn’t
keep pace with rising medical costs, so seniors would have to pay
thousands of dollars more a year for health care. The Roadmap would
revive Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security and “provide large tax
benefits to upper-income households . . . while shifting the burden onto
middle- and lower-income households. It is a dramatically different
approach in which much more risk is loaded onto individuals.” Ryan, who
had always had a good relationship with Orszag, later described the
briefing as the moment when “the budget director took that olive branch
and hit me in the face with it.”
But the confrontation enhanced
Ryan’s credibility among conservatives. He became the face of the
opposition, someone who could attack the President’s policies with facts
and figures. Indeed, at the retreat, Obama had mischaracterized Ryan’s
Medicare plan, and Ryan politely corrected him. The two men sparred
again the next month, at a summit at Blair House, over the President’s
health-care plan. The details of Ryan’s proposals and his critiques of
Obama’s mattered less than the fact that he was taking on the President.
House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders started to feel
pressure to take a position on the Ryan budget.
In July, Boehner
distanced himself from the plan. But Ryan’s outside-in strategy, of
building support among conservatives who would pressure Republican
leaders to embrace his ideas, started to pay off. An editorial in the
Weekly Standard
stated that “Republicans should embrace Ryan’s Road Map.” Dick Armey,
the former congressional leader, who had become a Tea Party organizer,
demanded that Republicans have the “courage” to back Ryan’s plan.
Boehner’s position insured that most Republican candidates didn’t listen
to Armey’s advice, and in 2010 they campaigned against Obama’s alleged
cuts to Medicare rather than for Ryan’s plan to end the program.
Still,
after the election, with the Republican Party racing rightward, Ryan
provided an intellectual blueprint: there were eighty-seven Republican
freshmen who wanted to starve the government but had no clear idea how
to do so. In December, in a
Wall Street Journal op-ed piece,
Sarah Palin endorsed the Roadmap, and every potential Republican
Presidential candidate knew that he or she, too, would have to take a
position on it. In January, 2011, Ryan was chosen to give the official
Republican response to the President’s State of the Union speech. “We
hold to a couple of simple convictions,” he said. “Endless borrowing is
not a strategy; spending cuts have to come first.”
During the next
four months, Ryan and McCarthy, the third-ranking Republican in the
House, convened a series of listening sessions for their colleagues,
placing special emphasis on the Republican freshmen. Wielding a
PowerPoint presentation that included photographs of chaos in Greece,
which was sliding into its debt crisis, the two led the new members of
Congress through the perils of the government’s fiscal trajectory, and
patiently explained how Ryan’s plan was both the only solution and a
political winner. In April, after months of this education campaign,
Ryan formally unveiled a third version of the Roadmap, renamed the Path
to Prosperity.
After the listening sessions, Ryan had removed some
of the most controversial ideas, including the manifesto-like
introduction, and even the Social Security privatization plan. The
credit for taxpayers to buy health insurance was scrapped as well, but
Ryan added a new plank: to repeal Obama’s health-care law and to
effectively cut Medicaid by a third. (Under the plan, Medicaid would no
longer keep up with rising medical costs.) Ryan conceded that he
couldn’t get his colleagues to go along with everything in the old plan.
“I had to pass a bill—I had to get two hundred and eighteen people,” he
told me. His original Roadmap “was just me, unplugged,” he said. “But
when you’re writing a budget you’re representing an entire conference,
and so you have to get consensus.”
Conservative opinion-writers
again celebrated his bravery. But there was one note of caution. The
ornery Charles Krauthammer doubted that Ryan’s ideas could survive a
Democratic onslaught in the 2012 campaign. “House Budget Committee
Chairman Paul Ryan has just released a recklessly bold, 73-page, 10-year
budget plan,” he wrote. “At 37 footnotes, it might be the most
annotated suicide note in history.”
In mid-April
of 2011, in a speech at George Washington University, Obama once again
decided to make an example of Ryan. Republicans were finally about to
vote on the Path to Prosperity, and the President was eager to offer his
opinion. Obama, for nearly the first time in his Presidency, emphasized
the ideological divide between the two parties rather than offering
bromides about what they shared. The White House invited Ryan to the
speech and reserved a V.I.P. seat for him. Obama had personally called
Ryan after Republicans won the majority in the House the previous
November, and Ryan thought the two might have a rapport. They both liked
sports and, because Ryan’s district runs along the Illinois border
close to Chicago, knew many of the same people. “He’s a cerebral guy who
likes policy, and he’s from my part of the country,” Ryan said. “At the
beginning, I did have some hope.”
Ryan sat in the front row as
the President shredded his plan. “I believe it paints a vision of our
future that’s deeply pessimistic,” Obama said. “There’s nothing serious
about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion
dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think
there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who
can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”
Ryan
seemed genuinely shocked. During a radio interview later in the day, he
complained that Obama had called him “un-American,” and he objected to
the charge that he was “pitting children with autism or Down syndrome
against millionaires and billionaires” and “ending America as we know
it.” Ryan told me, “I was expecting some counteroffer of some kind. What
we got was the gauntlet of demagoguery.”
Two days after the
speech, despite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan’s
plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four
Republicans voted against it. Ryan told me that the class of Republicans
elected in 2010 was transformational. “Usually, you get local career
politicians who want to be national career politicians,” he said.
“They’re more cautious. They’re more risk-averse. They’re more focussed
on just reëlection.” He went on, “This crop of people who came up are
doctors and dentists and small-business people and roofers and D.A.s.
They’re not here for careers—they’re here for causes.”
Whatever
benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his
increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on
conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any
Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped
scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles
deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in
December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed
commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the
G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan
plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican
senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement,
Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during
high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor
and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with
President Obama.
Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the
self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their
nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan
plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly
promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to
conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the
idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican
negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry
Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House
and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts
of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.
“That’s
what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican
congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What
Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate
Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul
Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s
about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being
disgraced.”
One afternoon in mid-July, John
Beckord, a Ryan supporter and the head of Forward Janesville, a
pro-business economic-development group, took me on a tour of Ryan’s
home town. As the years went by, the successful small businesses of the
old Irish Mafia came to be overshadowed by one employer, General Motors;
at its peak, in 1978, the automaker employed seventy-one hundred people
and later produced more than a thousand sport-utility vehicles a day.
Janesville has often served as a backdrop for Presidents and
Presidential candidates. During a campaign stop there in 2008, Obama
said, “The promise of Janesville has been the promise of America.” Later
that year, the plant announced that it would close, causing the loss of
some five thousand jobs in the area. Mitt Romney gave his standard
stump speech in Janesville recently, with Ryan at his side.
Beckord
drove along the perimeter of the abandoned plant, which stretched
across more than two hundred acres. He pointed out a wide plain of
asphalt, now sprouting weeds, that had once served as a parking lot for
thousands of cars. Through 2007, Ryan regularly requested government
money for special projects back home. Earmarks grew out of control
during the Bush years, but most of what Ryan asked for, and got, was
defensible: four hundred thousand dollars for a water-treatment plant;
three hundred thousand for a technical college where G.M. workers could
be retrained; seven hundred and thirty-five thousand for Janesville’s
bus system; and $3.3 million for highway projects throughout Wisconsin.
In 2008, however, Ryan vowed not to request earmarks anymore; he later
helped push through an outright ban. I asked Beckord whether Ryan’s
libertarianism ever clashed with the needs of his constituents. He
hesitated, then said, finally, “I suppose there could have been a
full-court press to just cobble together as much federal money as
possible on our behalf to make it irresistible for G.M. to keep this
plant open.”
When we got beyond the auto plant, Beckord pointed
out some of the promising initiatives in town. “We’re finding a new
identity,” he said. Since the plant closed, Janesville, which sits
almost at the center of a ring of major cities, including Milwaukee,
Chicago, St. Louis, Des Moines, and Minneapolis, has partly reinvented
itself as a distribution hub for major companies. “They don’t make
anything here,” Beckord explained. “But they distribute their products
from here.” We passed a John Deere facility where hundreds of lawn
tractors and mowers were stacked on pallets. Janesville is a major
distribution center for John Deere lawn-care products. Several other
national companies, including Grainger, which sells various industrial
products, and LeMans, which sells parts for motocross and snowmobiling
equipment, use Janesville for the same purpose.
As Janesville
increasingly becomes a base for the business of distribution logistics,
its single most pressing economic concern is good roads. Beckord pointed
toward Interstate 90, which runs southeast a hundred miles to Chicago.
“From an economic-vitality and economic-development perspective,
transportation infrastructure is huge,” he said. Next year, I-90 around
Janesville will begin expansion from four lanes to eight. The project,
the top issue for the local business community since the G.M. plant
closed, will be financed as part of a billion-dollar federal and state
highway project. “Paul has been as helpful as he can be to encourage
that development,” Beckord said. “But, as you know, he also has a
philosophical disconnect with the idea of earmarks.”
We passed a
warehouse-like building under construction where several men in hard
hats were at work. Beckord explained that it would soon house the
Janesville Innovation Center, providing entrepreneurs with commercial
space in which to launch their ideas. The money came from a $1.2-million
government grant through the Economic Development Administration, one
of Obama’s major stimulus programs.
There was one more success
story that Beckord wanted to share. A few years ago, he had a melanoma
that was treated with a radioactive isotope; this isotope is
administered to fifty-five thousand patients a day but has a half-life
of sixty-six hours after manufacture, so it must be delivered quickly.
The isotope, known as a medical tracer, is made outside the United
States by a complicated process requiring highly enriched uranium from
nuclear reactors. The government offered twenty-five-million-dollar
matching grants to companies that could devise a way to produce the
material domestically, without using enriched uranium. “Two of the four
companies that won that competition, incredibly, are going to build
plants in our county, and one of them is going to be in Janesville,”
Beckord said. In May, the federal government announced that it would
contribute more than ten million dollars to the new facility, which
could employ some hundred and fifty people.
The
current Presidential campaign centers on the debate about the
government’s role in the economy. Ryan, by forcing Republicans to
embrace his budget plan, has helped shape this debate. Obama, on July
13th, told a crowd in Virginia, “If you were successful, somebody along
the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your
life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that
we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and
bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else
made that happen.” He added, “When we succeed, we succeed because of our
individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”
To
Ryan, Obama’s words were anathema. In a conversation three days later
with James Pethokoukis, a conservative blogger for the American
Enterprise Institute, he had harsh criticisms for the President. “His
comments seem to derive from a naïve vision,” Ryan said, that is based
on “an idea that the nucleus of society and the economy is government,
not the people.” Obama’s “big-government spending programs fail to
restore jobs and growth,” he said, and amount to “a statist attack on
free communities.”
When I pointed out to Ryan that government
spending programs were at the heart of his home town’s recovery, he
didn’t disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. “Obama
is trying to paint us as a caricature,” he said. “As if we’re some
bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false
dichotomy and intellectually lazy.” He added, “Of course we believe in
government. We think government should do what it does really well, but
that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like
infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.” But independent
assessments make clear that Ryan’s budget plan, in order to achieve its
goals, would drastically reduce the parts of the budget that fund
exactly the kinds of projects and research now helping Janesville.
As
in 2009, Republicans are divided between those who think they can win
by pointing out Obama’s failures and those who want to run on a
Ryan-like set of ideas. Romney seems to want to be in the first camp,
but during the primaries he championed the ideas in Ryan’s budget. Ryan
is frequently talked about as a future leader of the House Republicans
and even as a long shot to be Romney’s running mate. He surely would
take either job, but he seems better suited to continuing what he’s been
doing since 2008: remaking the Republican Party in his image. You can’t
“run on vague platitudes and generalities,” he told me earlier this
month. He was speaking about Bush in 2004 and Obama four years ago. But
he clearly believes that the same holds true for Romney in November.
“He’s
already endorsed these things,” Ryan said. “I want a full-throated
defense for an alternative agenda that fixes the country’s problems. I
want to show the country that we have a solution to get us out of the
ditch we’re in, and to be proud about it.”
Ryan seemed unconcerned
that pushing his policy agenda on Romney might damage the candidate. “I
think life is short,” Ryan said at the end of our final conversation.
“You’d better take advantage of it while you have it.”
♦
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