Fanatic, Fraud, Factotum: The Rise and Fall of Paul Ryan. Requiem for the face and brain of the GOP

Requiem for the face and brain of the Republican Party.

By Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait

April 11, 2018
11:46 am

House Speaker Paul Ryan is retiring before he can lose his majority, and potentially his own seat in Congress, but too late to save his reputation.

The key to Ryan’s rise was that very few people understand who he was or where he came from. Ryan was a conservative-movement ideologue devoted to supply-side economics. During the Bush administration, Ryan demanded larger increases to the budget deficit than those he dismissed as “the green-eyeshade, austerity wing of the party” could swallow. He demanded larger debt-financed tax cuts, and tried to drum up support for a debt-financed Social Security privatization scheme that the Bush administration rejected as fiscally irresponsible. As a back-bench ideologue, he attracted little attention except from a handful of conservatives who agreed with his ideas.

Ryan burst onto the national scene in 2010 because he simultaneously fulfilled two major needs. The Republican Party needed a new leader who could rebrand them after the disaster of the Bush administration. And the national media and the business elite needed a Republican who could serve as a projection of their disappointment with the Obama administration.

And so the image of Paul Ryan that was introduced to the country was as America’s accountant, the Kevin Kline character from Dave, an earnest midwestern boy with a passion for saving the country from fiscal calamity. The kind of nightmare Ryan imagined was a very peculiar dystopian fantasy. Ryan believed the Obama administration was undermining the moral foundations of American society by redistributing too much income from the makers to the takers. As he explained in 2009, shortly before his star turn (and when he could scarcely have even predicted it):

But by 2010, Ryan had become the face and the brain of his party. And the national news media and the business elite had something different in mind when it came to fiscal calamity. They feared the budget deficit, which Ryan had spent his career working to increase, was too large, and they believed bipartisanship, which Ryan had spent his career ignoring, was the necessary solution. And so Ryan was cast to the country as the champion of bipartisan cooperation to solve the debt crisis, which was understood by these elites to be the country’s foremost problem. Here is the slick, high-production-value Ryan defining the crisis in elite-friendly, green-eyeshade terms:

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