...Ryan turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be a purifying ideologue, but rather a young, power-hungry, ladder-climbing trimmer -- less Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman and more Karl Rove and George W. Bush.
Ryan's principled opposition to big government and the welfare state would be more convincing, and give him more leverage and interest in serious debate, if he hadn't voted for a wide swath of the Bush-era expansion of big government and the welfare state. He even sought to shovel federal money back to Janesville, as his family business had done for generations.
He shifted to the right out of ideological remorse, I'll grant him that, but also out of calculation, once Barack Obama loomed on the horizon. Ryan has been amassing a war chest of his own ever since, and now has more money on hand than any other GOP member of the House . Looking back on it, it is remarkable that he didn't run for the Republican nomination.
This is no debate society guy. He is a 42-year-old spreadsheet-reading attack dog. That is all his budgets were about. He knew they couldn't become law. He rarely passed ANY laws. He wanted Tea Party cred, and to advertise himself to the conservative money.
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