Ryan rises as counterweight to Obama

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) continues to emerge as President Barack Obama’s fiscal alter ego in Washington.
Ryan criticized Obama’s health care reform ideas at the president’s bipartisan summit last week. Obama said he had read Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future Version 2.0” and
found some of its elements worthy of consideration.
This week, the national media spotlight continued to shine brightly on Ryan, who appears generally more diplomatic than Senate Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and more credible than Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
Ryan, known in Washington as a policy wonk, was held up as a beacon for the opposition to Obama in an editorial appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The editorial stated, “Nearby, we reprint Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s remarks at the health summit last week, which methodically dismantle the falsehoods – there is no other way of putting it – that Mr. Obama has used to sell "reform" and repeated again yesterday. No one in the political class has even tried to refute Mr. Ryan’s arguments, though he made them directly to the President and his allies, no doubt because they are irrefutable. If Democrats are willing to ignore overwhelming public opposition to ObamaCare and pass it anyway, then what’s a trifling dispute over a couple of trillion dollars?”
On Wednesday, Ryan withstood an interview by Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” and he was interviewed on the Fox Business channel.
In closing out his interview with Ryan, Matthews remarked, “Well, you’ve got a heck of a constituency out there in Wisconsin. They must all have Ph.D.’s in economics, because they do understand the problem … I see why the president likes you.”
– BizTimes Milwaukee