Man with a Plan

Steven Hayes has a long profile of Rep. Paul Ryan in the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard.  Please take some time to read the whole thing but here are a few takeaways:

Ryan has never been a title-chaser. He’s a guileless, straightforward man who wants to advance the ideas he believes in. It’s not quite accurate to say that he’s not political; he’s an effective politician, as one would have to be to consistently post huge victories in a district that Charlie Cook, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, has rated in the dead center—No. 218—on his partisan voter index. But if he were driven primarily by political considerations he wouldn’t have spent most of the last five years doing precisely the opposite of what most Republican pollsters and strategists were recommending.

Democratic strategist Joe Trippi on picking Ryan for VP:

If I were advising Romney,” said Trippi, “I’d tell him to pick Ryan. I just can’t see him doing it. But as a Democrat I’d personally prefer to see Romney pick a careful candidate, a clone. A gray suit.”

Trippi says that attacks on the Ryan budget are coming regardless of who is on the ticket. He believes the Obama campaign is focusing on Romney’s tenure at Bain because they need to convince voters that he’s willing to disregard the interests of the poor and the middle class to enrich himself and his friends. But the Bain argument is the beginning of their case, not the end of it. If this were a boxing match, these would be the body blows, the punches that set up the roundhouse.

Though Trippi doesn't mention it, the "roundhouse" is the Obama campaign's argument that under Romney's watch, Bain Capital outsourced jobs oversees.

But the most illuminating thing about Ryan are his townhalls in Wisconsin.  Here is a sample:

Ryan, the seven-term representative from Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, speaks quickly, as if the coming collapse might happen in the middle of his remarks if he takes too much time. It’s a bracing message. He is saying, in effect, that the American experiment, our 236 extraordinary years of self-government, is on the verge of failure.

And yet Ryan is smiling. It’s not the phony grin of a politician seeking votes, or the half-smirk of a charlatan putting one over on a group of rubes. It’s a real smile—the eager smile of someone excited to share important news. Paul Ryan believes he has the solution to these problems. And after a long and often lonely fight to convince his fellow Republicans that they should be talking about these issues, Ryan is succeeding.

That Ryan shows he understands the capacity for people to reason and understand what is truly going on in Washington is evident.  That he understands that government is built upon the consent of the government but in turn requires not simply consent but enlightened consent is evident as well.  From what I have read in Ryan's speeches and writings, he not only understands founding principles -- the principles most eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence -- but he also understands how to realize those principles through the political process.

I count myself with Trippi that Romney should pick Ryan.  Whether he does this or not -- whether he acts more or less like the Republican leadership prior to the 2010 election -- remains to be seen.