Looks like the shine might be off Rep. Paul Ryan:
Handsome, precious Paul Ryan, six-term Republican from the safe-as-apple-pie Janesville, Wisconsin, has fallen into a pout that worries his friends and entertains his enemies in the family feud that is the House GOP.
Ryan, 40, is supposed to be the bullet-proof numbers guy, ranking on the House Budget Committee, who is eager to take the chairmanship in the new Congress following the promised wave election; he is supposed to be the gifted ingénue who spent these last years in the minority bent over his spread sheets while he tweaked his grindingly wonkish genius of 2008, “A Roadmap for America’s Future.”
Instead, the Paul Ryan talked about these days on the Hill is withdrawn, conflicted, chagrined, and unavailable. And most importantly, he was missing in action last week at the ballyhooed Republican roll-out of “The Pledge to America” in a Virginia hardware store.
Why was Ryan a no-show? Ryan’s flacks claim his absence was a scheduling problem, which is a deliberately uncreative excuse. Ryan’s allies say he skipped the event because he’s genuinely stumped about why the leadership ignored his celebrated “Roadmap” that lays out a utopia in which America would solve health care, Social Security, taxes and jobs with Leprechaun dust and diligence. Nothing of Ryan’s years of homework is to be found in the “Pledge,” and the absence is so obvious that the whispering is that Ryan is either in fresh disfavor or worse, self-exile.
While Rep. Ryan may find himself in disfavor or self-exile, I’m betting it won’t last long, because he’s certainly got long-term ambitions that don’t involve a career as the Congressman for Wisconsin’s first Congressional District.
Ryan thinks of himself as entitled to a higher office, so he cant handle anyone criticizing him.
Ryan knows that his roadmap is unworkable in the areas that actually have detail and meaningless in the rest. The Republicans just took the meaningless parts so as to offend fewer people.