The standard image of a cost-cutting Washington politician is a certain kind of dour old man — a pinch-fisted Dickensian fussbudget who wags his finger and scolds Americans about living within their means. But on April 5, the U.S. met the new face of federal frugality in the form of Republican Congressman Paul Ryan.
Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a touch of Eagle Scout to him, the House Budget Committee chairman unveiled an ambitious package of huge budget cuts designed to dig the country out of its crippling debt crisis. For Ryan, reining in spending is nothing less than an act of patriotic valor. “For too long, Washington has not been honest with the American people,” he said. “We owe it to the country to give them an honest debate … We’re not just here so we can get this lapel pin that says we’re a member of Congress. We are here to try and fix this country’s problems.”
Ryan sounds bold where others have been timid because he’s spent years preparing for this moment. Before his 1998 election from a swing district in southeastern Wisconsin, dotted with industrial plants and lake resorts, he earned a degree in economics and political science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, then went on to work for a series of GOP luminaries, including the late policy innovator Jack Kemp and think-tank founder William Bennett. Arriving in Congress when he was just 29, Ryan made a name for himself fast, burrowing into health care policy and showing an appetite for politically risky budget fights. It was enough to make even some of Ryan’s colleagues question his political sense.
He may be a modern political star, but there’s still something a little old-fashioned about Ryan, right down to his crow’s-beak nose. Maybe it’s the premature seriousness that comes from finding your father dead of a heart attack when you were 16 and then helping to care for a grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease.
Now a married father of three, Ryan is a PowerPoint fanatic with an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents. “I love the field of economics,” Ryan says. “I have a knack for numbers. And I’ve just delved into this issue for my adult life, basically.”
Of course, the U.S.’s political battlefields are littered with brave warriors who once spoke hopefully of taking on budgetary sacred cows. But Ryan is gambling that the climate is different today. Washington has talked ad nauseam about the need to shrink our debt before world financial markets lose faith in America’s solvency, leading to unimaginable economic chaos. But when a bipartisan fiscal commission created by President Obama — who has repeatedly spoken of the need for deficit reduction — came up with a set of proposals in December, partisans on both sides bashed its ideas and Obama kept a cautious distance. Nor did Obama offer substantial deficit-reduction ideas in his State of the Union address. “When the President decided not to do anything in his budget, that’s when I made my mind up,” Ryan says.
See “Conflict vs. Compromise: A Tale of Two Freshmen in Congress.”
See Twelve for ’12: A Dozen Republicans Who Could Be the Next President.”
