Ryan’s Rise To Speaker
With the election of Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan to speaker of the house, many Beltway insiders are publicly professing hope that the internecine conflict and gridlock of the Boehner years will be put aside. Ryan, we are now being told, is the face of legislative competence, a political prodigy who is one of Washington’s top policy experts and a proven dealmaker who can work with adversaries across the aisle. All of that is true, but is it what America needs? From his credentials and political history, Paul Ryan is a younger, more charismatic edition of John Boehner, favored by the Washington establishment for his ideological pliancy and willingness to continue the seemingly never-ending era of unrestrained government growth. Small wonder that Obama’s Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz recently told the press that Ryan was a man the president “can work with.”
Ryan’s Pedigree
Paul Ryan, a fifth-generation Wisconsinite, was probably born to be a politician. His father, an accomplished lawyer, worked in the same building as the father of another well-known Wisconsin politician, former Democratic senator Russ Feingold. The bright, affable Ryan experienced family tragedy in his teenage years when he discovered his father dead in his bed of a heart attack at age 55. Determined to excel, he saved his father’s Social Security benefits until he was 18 to pay for college. He enrolled in Miami of Ohio and majored in economics and political science, studying under libertarian professor Richard Hart. Hart introduced Ryan to the writings of free market economists such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, as well as the Objectivist philosophy and novels of Ayn Rand.
Ryan, not content with armchair theorizing, was politically active in college, becoming active in the College Republicans and volunteering for the campaign of a then little-known up-and-coming Ohio politician named John Boehner.
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