Is Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan Too Bold for the GOP?

It’s Paul Ryan’s 12th year in congress, but it’s his 13th year at the Racine County Fair goat-milking competition in Wisconsin, and he is a little sick of losing to beauty queens. So he recently got his goat game on, explaining his technique to a reporter: “You have to squeeze down and then aim,” he says, miming a goat’s udder in the air. “It’s harder than milking a cow,” he adds, “but it’s easier than milking a bull.”

Ryan, 40, isn’t afraid to muck out the stalls in Washington either. At a time when most of his Republican colleagues are content to posture as the Party of No, Ryan is virtually alone in his determination to detail exactly what the U.S. must do to cut federal spending and make a dent in the nation’s $13 trillion debt. In a very short time, he has become a hero to deficit hawks. Ryan, says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is “one of three, maybe four, young Republicans who are going to change the face of the party.”

(See “Paul Ryan: The GOP’s Answer to the ‘Party of No’.”)

He’s already doing that. Ryan has been sticking thorns in Congress’s side since he began offering amendments to reduce lawmakers’ pork projects a decade ago. In 2003 he forced Republicans to put free-market reforms in the Medicare prescription-drug program before he and other fiscal conservatives would vote for it. In 2006 he wrote legislation that would give the President line-item veto power–a move lawmakers on both sides have long resisted. In 2007 he called for earmark transparency; two years later, he was seeking a moratorium on the pet giveaways.

But at the heart of Ryan’s revolution is his Roadmap for America’s Future–an ambitious 87-page, 75-year plan for getting America back in the black. Ryan has been thinking of this plan for years, but it wasn’t until he became ranking member of the House Budget Committee in 2007 that he had enough clout to get the Congressional Budget Office to crunch his numbers. He proposes semiprivatizing Social Security by allowing younger workers to divert part of their payments to individual accounts they could access at retirement. He suggests abolishing Medicare and replacing it with vouchers for private insurers. He proposes capping total spending and freezing nondefense discretionary spending, though he leaves defense spending untouched.

(See pictures of the GOP in Ohio.)

Ryan is the first to admit that his plan is not perfect. He knows the cost of health care could outpace the value of the vouchers, thereby shunting much of the tab onto patients. A study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that his plan would actually increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion by 2020 because it doesn’t take into account $4 trillion in lost tax revenue. Ryan disputes the calculations behind those numbers but says he’d be willing to increase taxes to fix any shortfalls. In early August, liberal economist Paul Krugman took a whack at Ryan’s plan and declared it as hollow as a piñata. “Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought,” he wrote in the New York Times. “He’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s drenched in flimflam sauce.”

Ryan replies by noting that someone has to go first. “I really sincerely hoped that a few other people from both parties would start throwing their plans out there, and then we’d get into the business of debating these things. But unfortunately, we’re going to have to go through another round of turning these things into third rails and political weapons,” Ryan says in an interview in his office.

If Ryan is the most intellectually serious Republican at the moment, that’s no guarantee he’ll be successful. Only 13 GOP House members have endorsed his Roadmap. “Parts of it are well done,” House minority leader John Boehner says but then pauses. “Other parts I’ve got some doubts about, in terms of how good the policy is.” For now, it’s mostly Democrats who love Ryan. His plan, says Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, “is a gift. I totally respect Paul’s courage for putting this out there. But we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about how we’ll be fighting to protect Social Security and Medicare.” Ryan is philosophical about his predicament. “The appetite is much stronger outside the Beltway than inside,” he says. “The political class up here is in the old thinking, which is, This is such a political weapon, don’t touch it, don’t touch it, don’t touch it, you’ll die. Because they listen to the pollsters.”

(See pictures of the emergence of Paul Rand.)

That’s the sort of remark you’d expect from a man who was first elected to Congress at the age of 28. Born in Janesville, Wis., a union-heavy auto town, Ryan got a double degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. There he found a mentor in conservative economist Richard Hart, who helped Ryan win an internship and then a job in the office of Senator Bob Kasten, a Wisconsin conservative. After that, Ryan touched all the stations of the conservative cross, working for Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, writing speeches for Jack Kemp’s vice-presidential campaign in 1996 and then doing a stint for Kemp and Bill Bennett at Empower America, a GOP think tank.

(See 10 questions with Charlie Crist.)

Married with three kids, Ryan is a health nut: he runs a grueling daily exercise class in Washington for members of Congress–think 200 push-ups. “My dad always said, ‘It’s not worth doing something if it’s not hard,'” Ryan notes. “The deficit–that’s the hardest problem we have, and that’s why I’m working on it. I just hope enough people join me so that we can actually do something about it.”

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