RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/269927

Across town, the wonks are waiting.

So are Conor Sweeney, Rep. Paul Ryan’s communications director, and Austin Smythe, the staff director at the House Budget Committee. Smythe, his arms piled with papers, lingers beside Ryan’s sport-utility vehicle, which is parked near the Capitol steps. Sweeney, an easygoing twentysomething, sits in the driver’s seat.

Where is Ryan? The Budget Committee chairman, a youthful 41-year-old Republican, is nowhere to be found. Various backbenchers and aides hustle past. Sweeney checks his watch. Ryan is due to speak at the Hyatt Regency, over on New Jersey Avenue, within minutes. But House votes, as they tend to, have gone long.

“Paul! Paul!” hollers Sweeney as Ryan bounds out of the Capitol, his iPod in hand. Ryan swivels and approaches. He jumps into the backseat, which is cluttered with toys, empty juice boxes, and papers. “My wife and kids are in town,” he explains. “We went to Mount Vernon. They loved it.”

Indeed, the car’s interior, scuffed and stained, is a toddler’s paradise. Ryan picks up a plastic box of chocolate, which has melted under the summer sun, and in jest offers me a dripping, smeared piece. He chuckles as Sweeney hits the gas. Zooming past the Senate, he does not turn his head. Ryan recently turned down the chance to run for Wisconsin’s open Senate seat next year. His gaze, in most respects, remains fixed on the lower chamber.

Ka-thunk. As the wheels bounce out of the Capitol complex, Smythe hands Ryan a manila folder, which he thumbs as we make our way toward the hotel. In a few minutes, the congressman will address the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s annual conference. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, big-name investors, and various academics will be there.

Once we arrive, Ryan does not break a sweat as he rushes down the escalator and into the camera-swarmed ballroom. He takes a seat near David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, down the row from former senator Alan Simpson, his sparring partner on the president’s debt-reduction commission. He is on time, but barely.

The moderator quickly asks Ryan to weigh in. He nods at the familiar faces. “We took over the majority on the cusp of a debt crisis,” he begins. “We all know around here the size of the problem, the scope of the problem. To govern is to actually put an idea on the table. That’s what we did.”

Ryan often speaks at these types of events, sometimes two or three such summits in one day. Jugs of ice water, white-linen tablecloth, fruit trays, cerebral discussion of political challenges — these are the props to Ryan’s traveling, truth-telling show. As the GOP’s charismatic budget expert, he is in high demand.

But it is not just the Wall Street crowd that appreciates the Wisconsin Republican. Many leading conservatives wish that he would speak to crowds outside the Beltway, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire, as a presidential candidate.

For months, Ryan has rebuffed the begging cries. His kids are too small, he says, and he enjoys being an influential committee chairman. Yet his reluctance to enter the race has not dimmed his rising star; if anything, it has made him more powerful. As White House hopefuls hit the trail, they look to Ryan, more than anyone, as the pacesetter on fiscal policy.

As we chat in the backseat, returning to the Capitol, Ryan acknowledges that he has a role to play in 2012 — that he cannot sit on the sidelines as the presidential primary heats up. He is eager to join the debate. At this early stage, however, he is careful to not wade in too far, lest someone thinks he is considering a late entry into the field.

“As far as I am concerned, my answer has not changed,” he says. “I feel like I am in a good place where I am right now. I have a young family, and I can balance that and the cause, and make a big difference where I am. If I left to run a campaign, I would risk politicizing my aspect of the cause, and I would not see my family for 18 months.

“Now, I know that 18 months in a person’s lifetime is short, and that’s what everybody keeps telling me,” he says. “But I still go back to the fact that where I am right now, I am uniquely positioned to make a real difference.”

In coming months, Ryan may travel to early primary states, but only once the “Ryan for president” chatter fades. “Perhaps after it is clear, once I knew that I would not be stoking rumors,” he says. “But I have stayed out of those states because I did not want to send misleading signals.” In this town, he muses, “everybody watches what you do, not what you say.”

Ryan aims to be the cycle’s supply-side champion, playing a Jack Kemp–like role to the party nominee, informing them on economics and battling alongside them, as a happy warrior, for tough medicine. “What I can do is help to raise the standards,” he says.

He will not issue specific challenges to the contenders — “I think that kind of thing is petty” — but he will urge them to seriously evaluate the country’s fiscal and economic condition, and the solutions outlined in the House GOP budget that passed earlier this year.

“Look, there are other ways of dealing with these problems, but if you are a conservative, if you believe in limited government and free markets, it has to look something like this, or otherwise you will be using a big-government solution,” Ryan says. “With all of those details, there is plenty of room for debate. We should have a healthy debate. We should all keep our minds open about how to keep our principles and figure this out.”

Ryan enjoys getting into the weeds on policy, but when it comes to the 2012 presidential campaign, he does not want to see bickering over minutia. Fiscal numbers, of course, are very important to him, but getting the party to embrace “big ideas” is paramount.

Ryan recalls that Kemp, a late congressman and the GOP’s 1996 vice-presidential nominee, taught him about how to frame conservative policies on the national stage. Before Ryan first ran for Congress in 1998, he spent nearly a decade in Washington as a speechwriter and policy director on Capitol Hill. Early on, he joined Kemp’s think tank, Empower America.

“He taught me that big ideas are the best politics,” Ryan says. “They will always be challenged, and they will sometimes be controversial, but you have to do what you think is right, what you’re passionate about, and be a strong advocate for it. If you do that, you can shift the debate in major ways. He showed me how you can do that.

“This is not a green-eyeshade experiment,” he continues. “You cannot forget about growth and prosperity, about having an optimistic agenda. It goes back to the core ideas of the Republic. Jack always connected those things. That’s what we have tried to do, and I think we have tapped a vein.”

It has not always gone smoothly. Last month, Republicans lost a ruby-red House seat in western New York. Many fingered Ryan’s reforms as the deciding factor. With his push to move Medicare toward a premium-support model, Ryan has come under constant criticism, from both parties, for pushing too hard, too fast.

Ryan shrugs off the bumps in the road. He says that come 2012, the House GOP budget may not be a litmus test, but it will be a major factor in the debate. Candidates will have to heed its message, even if they do not agree with its specifics. He points to the experience of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who recently raised questions about the budget.

Gingrich charged in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press that Ryan’s budget was “right-wing social engineering.” Almost immediately, Gingrich, now a presidential candidate, found himself in hot water with conservatives. “That shows how far conservatism has advanced in Congress and in the country,” Ryan says. “It has gotten to the point of grabbing and defending specifics, and defending those of us who stuck our necks out to fight for this.”

He is pleased that Gingrich’s take on the budget on Meet got immediate and decisive pushback. “What happened there is important,” he says. “It shows that we have an internal, disciplinary mechanism in our party to make sure that we underscore and do not undercut.”

But Gingrich’s criticism is, in many ways, an anomaly. Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who is running for president, recently echoed many of Ryan’s ideas during a major economic policy speech in Chicago. “I think that’s great,” Ryan says of Pawlenty’s remarks. “These are not my ideas. These are the country’s founding ideas, this is conservatism. All I am trying to do is upgrade and update them for the times and our challenges. The more people who can do that, the better the chance we have to succeed. I am relieved when others get out there, especially the presidential candidates.”

For now, Ryan will likely remain on the fence, watching the primary unfold. “I really have no idea who the nominee will be,” he laughs. The candidate he was most interested in endorsing, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, bowed out of contention last month. Ryan was disappointed by the decision.

“Mitch and I talked quite a bit in the run-up to his decision,” he says, gazing out toward the mall, where tourists stroll. “We do not agree on everything, but we are kindred spirits. That was the one candidacy that I was probably more knowledgeable about, and excited about, after talking with him.”

As our short journey ends, Sweeney pulls up beside the Capitol steps. Smythe runs through the schedule: another vote, another debate, another meeting. Ryan loves it. But before we part, he makes a final comment about the role he hopes to play.

“Our goal was to get 2011 right so we get 2012 right,” he says. “Part of getting 2011 right is raising the standards of what modern conservatism and the Republican party stand for, so that whoever gets the nomination can clear the higher bar. We don’t just want to get the next guy in line, like we have nominated so many times before. We want the best guy.”

Thing is, in spite of his protests, many Republicans see Ryan as that fellow.

— Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.