Schneider: Paul Ryan's policies deserved a better politics

Christian Schneider

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

On the morning of May 27, 1995, the legislative director for U.S. Rep. Sam Brownback made his first appearance on C-Span's "Washington Saturday Journal" cable television show. Fielding phone calls from viewers early on a Saturday morning, the 25-year-old Republican staffer passionately argued in favor of a free-market solution for America's health care system as he fired off budget numbers like a Gatling gun.

"We would like to offer more choices to health care recipients," he nervously told viewers. "We would like to instill private sector forces such as choice," he said, adding that seniors should be able to both choose their own doctor and "have an incentive to go and save some money in the health care market."

Nearly 22 years later, Paul Ryan stood in front of the nation as speaker of the House explaining why his dream of market-oriented health reform was dead. Just two weeks earlier, Ryan had delivered a PowerPoint presentation explaining that his recently introduced bill was "the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing Obamacare."

But last Friday, after the Obamacare "repeal and replace" bill fell short, Ryan struggled to explain why. “We were a 10-year opposition party," he said, "where being against things was easy to do. You just had to be against it. Now, in three months’ time, we tried to go to a governing party where we actually had to get 216 people to agree with each other on how we do things.”

It was a catastrophe for the Republican Party in general and for Ryan in particular. The GOP didn't become a "governing party" in three months — it had seven years to come up with a plan that both moderates and conservatives could accept. In the next election cycle, voters will have reason to be skeptical that Republican candidates up and down the ballot will do what they promise.

It didn't help Ryan that his negotiating partner was a president with virtually no knowledge of the changes he sought to make and who was unpersuasive to recalcitrant representatives.

But even Ryan's biggest fans have to concede that the strategy on the health bill was bungled. House leadership thought it could introduce new health care legislation the same way Beyoncé drops new albums, surprising America and skipping the critical review period. But Congress has no Beyhive, and none of the major conservative groups that would normally cheer Obamacare's repeal roared in approval when the secret bill was made public.

And rather than staking out a negotiating position on the right, the bill attempted to thread the needle between free-market solutions and keeping as much of Obamacare as possible. This angered conservatives and moderates, and both pulled on the plan. Had Ryan proposed something more conservative, he could have negotiated his way back to the middle.

This week, liberal magazine The New Republic declared the health care fiasco to be "The Death of Paul Ryan, Policy Genius," further deriding the speaker as more" con artist than wonk." But this analysis has it exactly backward; since his days as a legislative staffer, few have had a more thorough grasp on policy than Ryan. It was only Ryan's expertise in budget matters that made it possible to discuss reforming entitlement programs in polite company.

He routinely turned down chances to run for president because he enjoyed crafting sweeping proposals to right America's fiscal ship. (Among them, the "Path to Prosperity," the "Roadmap for America's Future," the "Tollway to Tax Cuts," and "the "Boulevard to Balanced Budgets." Note – I may have made a couple of those up.)

Crafting common sense proposals and herding members of Congress into voting for them are two different things — especially when your proposals are rescinding a benefit granted by a previous administration. The talents needed for writing legislation and strategizing its passage are often in conflict; it is as if the Green Bay Packers ordered Aaron Rodgers to play linebacker just because he's a football player.

In January of 2014, amid rumors he was in line to become speaker of the House, Ryan firmly denied his interest. “I’m more of a policy person," he told a gathering in San Antonio, Texas. "I prefer spending my days on policy and my weekends at home with my family."

Maybe it's time we started believing him.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger. Email cschneider@jrn.com. Twitter: @Schneider_CM