Fussbudget
How Paul Ryan Captured the G.O.P.
by Ryan Lizza
The New Yorker
August 6, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza

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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