Today, Explained - Paul Ryan vs. himself

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

After 20 years, Speaker Paul Ryan is set to leave the House of Representatives in early January. Ezra Klein says Paul Ryan’s legacy would be a big let down to… Paul Ryan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today Explained comes from Quip Electric Toothbrushes. If you're looking for an electric toothbrush that costs, say, I don't know, $25 and like has refills that are free the first time but cost $5 every three months after that, the Quip Electric Toothbrush is the toothbrush for you. Get to quip.com slash explained. Paul Ryan's last day as Speaker of the House is fast approaching. He'll kick off the new year by leaving the United States House of Representatives after 20 years of service. Ezra Klein has been writing about Ryan for a good while and says,

2018 Paul Ryan would be a real bummer to the young Paul Ryan who couldn't wait to come legislate in Washington, D.C. So he is a longtime Republican staffer. He works at Republican think tanks. He works for Jack Kemp, who was Bob Dole's vice presidential candidate in 1996. And that Jack Kemp experience is very formative for Ryan. He's very famously a devotee of Ayn Rand. It inspired me so much that it's required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We

start with Atlas Shrugged. But you can't find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism. He's like a very conservative guy. He's a movement conservative. He believes in movement conservatism. He believes in movement conservative policy. He's elected to Congress at a reasonably young age, 28 years old. And, you know, he's around. He's not a very big deal for a while. He's considered a kind of up and coming congressman. But people aren't paying that much attention to him in the early years. He really comes into his own in the Obama era because what happens there is that Republicans are completely outmatched by Obama functionally and him and his policy teams, just policy savvy. They're dealing with the wreckage of the George W. Bush years. Bush left office an incredibly unpopular president

with a quite discredited agenda. And not only did Bush leave with that discredited agenda, but he left with having created a financial crisis, or at least having let a financial crisis happen. So the Republican agenda was just in tatters. The brand was in tatters. And so Obama gets elected and Democrats win the House and they win the Senate and they have all this power. And Ryan is one of the people who ends up emerging as their party's answer to this. He emerges because he's young, so he doesn't feel the people, even though this is not really true, quite as associated with the Bush administration's failures. But it should be said, Ryan voted for the tax cuts.

He voted for the wars. He voted for the Medicare prescription drug benefit. So it's actually not like he was somehow asleep or not around during that period. But secondarily, Ryan comes out in this very public way and says, we were wrong. Most people used to think of the Republican Party as the fiscally conservative, responsible party. That was the tallest pole in our tent that unified people, moderate and conservative. We took an axe to that pole over the years. And he begins bringing out these budgets that show that unlike in the Bush years,

Republicans are going to make these very different decisions. And Ryan has his big star turn at what's called the Blair House Summit. Thank you so much for participating today. I am very grateful to all of you because I know how busy you are. President Obama, when Obamacare seemed potentially like it was not going to pass in Congress, he invites Republicans and Democrats to the Blair House to have a day-long summit and discussion of health care. And Ryan gets up and gives this very, like, charts and graphs thick argument about how the bill was underestimating its real spending and it was double counting. The Senate Budget Committee chairman said

that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud. Now, when you take a look at the Medicare cuts. So Ryan takes his kind of burgeoning reputation built out of these budget proposals he's doing and then has this sort of star turn where he's the only Republican kind of able to stand up and talk to President Obama, like in the language of policy won't agree. And so when you take a look at this, it's really deeper than the deficits or the budget gimmicks or the actuarial analysis. There really is a difference between us.

And we've been talking about how much we agree on different issues, but there really is a difference between us. And it's basically this. We don't think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control. And that's kind of where Ryan's ascent comes from. He then really leans into being the debt and deficits guy, because if you're looking at it cynically, like that is the Republican Party's best stick with which to stop Obama. Because, you know, if Obama can't spend because the deficit is too high, then he can't really do most of what he

wants to do. And since Republicans won't allow anybody to increase taxes, well, that's that. And so Ryan kind of like puts all this together and this becomes a really fast rise in the Republican Party ranks. He's chairman of the Budget Committee. Then he's Mitt Romney's vice presidential candidate. Then he's chairman of the very powerful Ways and Means Committee. And then in 2015, when John Boehner decides to step down as speaker, Boehner says to him, like, you are the only person who can do this job. You're the only person who can unite the Republican Party. And the thing that in theory, Ryan is uniting the Republican Party around is his policy vision. That's kind of how

we get to 2015, where Ryan takes a helm. He's sort of the chief crafter of the Republican agenda. And it's also why I think his particular brand of failure here is so notable, because he did not rise as a coalitional politician. He did not rise as a mere functionary. He rose as the guy articulating what Republicans were supposed to stand for. And then when in office, he took the most public thing he had articulated and went in the literal opposite direction. And a lot of that happens once President Trump enters office. Yeah, so Ryan takes the speakership on October 29th, 2015. This is the people's gavel. In the people's name, it is my privilege to hand this gavel to the Speaker of the House, Congressman and Honorable Paul Ryan.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Nancy. So he's there as Speaker for about a year under President Obama and does not get all that much done. And, you know, there are things where you could have imagined more constructive work between the two. Like, Ryan had this proposal to

increase the earned income tax credit expanded to childless workers. The Obama administration want to do the same thing. They can never seem to get Ryan to actually work with them on that. But the bulk of his time comes under Trump. And part of Ryan's trajectory here is he clearly never likes Trump. He is sort of always in this position between being a leader in the party, so he doesn't want to come down on his party's nominee, but clearly being personally repulsed by this guy. Yeah, how is he during the election?

Certainly at some point, after the grab him by the pussy tape comes out, he says to his members, like, he is not going to be working on the presidential election. He's going to work on getting Republicans elected to the House. He is very much not a Trump guy.

He's not one of the guys who's there for Donald Trump in his dark moments, but he doesn't abandon Trump either, right? He tries to walk this middle way, which he ends up trying to walk for a Trump guy. He's not one of the guys who's there for Donald Trump in his dark moments. But he doesn't abandon Trump either, right? He tries to walk this middle way, which he ends up trying to walk for a long time. Some have suggested that you haven't been tough enough on the president. What's your response? I find it's more effective to speak directly to the president about issues and concerns than to go on TV and speak about the president.

And Ryan, like there are all these memes from this age and from Trump's presidency. It's like, you know, Ryan screaming behind his sad blue eyes, like kind of mouthing words of bland support, or I didn't read the tweet, but seeming very unhappy to be there. Yeah, I could do with a whole lot fewer tweets. And he knows that we've talked about this many, many times. And clearly he didn't like it, right? He was speaker for a couple of years and then he retired from Congress, right? He left the thing entirely. He didn't decide to run for Senate or run for governor in Wisconsin or anything else. And maybe he will in the future.

Who knows? But he clearly does not like the position he ends up in as this kind of, you know, intermediary figure in the Republican Party. But it is a position he served out. It is a position he decided to do. And it is a position where he could have made very different choices or opposed Trump more frontally or forced a different Republican agenda in the House. I mean, he could have shown more courageous leadership, and he just didn't. He kind of let it be known that he wasn't happy with the situation,

but it's not exactly, in my view, a profile in Courage. Is there a moment that we can think of or point to where it seems like Ryan's just had enough of this gig? I don't think so. I cannot think of a single moment, and I'm not sure there is a single moment where Ryan is like, that's it. That's it for me. And Ryan has been very oblique in his thinking here. He said that he wouldn't really do anything differently, that he's very proud of his accomplishments, that history will treat this congressional majority that he ran really well. And if he's so proud and if it's going so great and if it's going to be such a historically admired role, it's a little bit unclear why he decided to leave it. As he's kind of gone on his exit tour,

you know, he's been talking about how identity politics is bad and political tribalism is bad and white identity politics are bad too. He's sort of subtweeting Donald Trump in this tour, obviously talking a lot about how identity politics on the left are bad, how politics is too angry now.

But, you know, Ryan didn't make any of this better. He didn't help. He didn't bring to the floor immigration proposals, which he supported personally, that could have offered a way out of some of these problems. So Ryan kind of wants credit for talk when he did not do the actual work behind it. He's good at giving a speech. He's a good communicator. There's no doubt about that. But when the chips are down, he often does not make the hard decisions. And he's certainly not willing to pay. He's a good communicator. There's no doubt about that. But when the chips are down,

he often does not make the hard decisions and he's certainly not willing to pay the cost of making the hard decisions. And I think that in a very fundamental way will be his legacy. So I reached out to listeners yesterday and asked if anyone had ever tried to brush their dog's teeth with the Quip electric toothbrush, since listeners had asked me some time ago if that would be something I would be interested in doing. Em wrote back with actually a video of her dog Fenton. And so her boyfriend, I think, is holding the quip up to Fenton, who looks to be a very good boy, maybe like a golden retriever of some kind.

Fenton's scared. He jumps on the bed runs away from the quip runs up to M in the bathroom who's filming and is trying to get as far away as possible from the quip but is curious too but then every time he gets close he runs back into the bathroom and clearly just

wants no part not a fan of the quip electric toothbrush. But I hear great things about the Quip and humans. Getquip.com slash explained. Your first set of refills is free. Ezra, Paul Ryan's run as Speaker of the House is coming to an end. He oversaw the House during the most jarring jump cut in the history of American politics, Obama to Trump.

How do you think we should think about Paul Ryan's time as Speaker? I think it is worth judging Paul Ryan by the standards he set out to have himself judged. I mean, Paul Ryan's whole career has been, or at least the part of his career in which he rose to Republican and national prominence, has been about being the most anti-debt politician in America. I mean, Paul Ryan was a guy saying that we were going to become Greece with people flinging Molotov cocktails in the streets. He was a guy saying, yes, the Republican Party, including him, they lost their principles during the Bush era, but they had rediscovered them now. They were now a party of hard choices and fiscal responsibility and being clear about what they were going to do. And I think that the

simplest way to sum up Paul Ryan's actual speakership, not the one he talks about, but the one he had, is that in every single one of the five years before Paul Ryan became Speaker, so 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, the deficit went down every year, year after year. In every single one of the three years after Paul Ryan became Speaker, the deficit rose 2018 and 2015 is about $350 billion. So that is, by Paul Ryan's own standards, a failure. He pushed us closer to becoming Greece. How did Paul Ryan justify that?

Paul Ryan will say that he got done what he could get done and that a lot of people wanted him to start a war in his party over things he could not get done and that wouldn't have accomplished anything. So he says and his defenders will say with even more clarity that if Paul Ryan had full power, he would have done things differently. He would have done entitlement reforms and he would have cut more spending and maybe he would have done tax reform differently. But he didn't. He was speaker, which is a coalitional position in which he is trying to build out compromises that his members of Congress, you know, enough of them to pass bills and Donald Trump and the Senate can support. And this is simply, in my view, not true. So I'll give one very clear example. There were a lot of immigration reform

compromises, compromises that would have helped the dreamers quite a bit in particular, that could have passed the House if Paul Ryan had let them come to the floor. And he didn't. He said he would not let anything come to the floor on immigration that Donald Trump did not himself support. On deficits, he let tons of things, and in fact, personally pushed a lot of bills on the floor that were tax cuts that were unpaid for or spending that was unpaid for. So he had power. He has said that he wishes debt and immigration. Those are two things he wishes they could have gone and done.

But it was in his power to shape the agenda such that they got addressed or at least weren't made worse. And he declined to use that power. So I think Paul Ryan has developed a very passive understanding of leadership. And internally, I think the understanding of leadership his team has developed is that their job was to keep the Republican Party together. What do you think Ryan's greatest hits are? What will he be proudest of from his time as speaker?

He's been very clear about this. Paul Ryan's greatest hit is tax reform. The tax system was atrocious. I spent my adult life working on tax reform. Ever since I did it with Jack Kemp, working on the issue, we really did have the worst tax system in the industrialized world, and it was hollowing out American competitiveness. We have now put underneath the economy a far, far stronger foundation for a healthy economy and growth because of that.

They slashed the corporate tax rate. They slashed taxes on wealthy individuals. And then there are a bunch of middle class tax cuts in there that expire after 10 years as a way of making the bill look cheaper than it is. Even with those gimmicks, by the way, the bill puts $1.5 trillion or so on the credit card. And then over 20 years, if they made everything permanent, which is what they want to do now, it would cost about $4 trillion at a national debt. But Paul Ryan feels that that was a tremendous achievement of his. He tried to repeal Obamacare but didn't. He did get the individual mandate repealed again in the tax bill. They increased what the party really stands for, which is exactly what it stood for under George W. Bush as well, which is tax cuts for corporations and richer Americans. It is increased defense spending. And it's what they've been trying to do ever since Obamacare passed. And Ryan certainly took the old college try at that. So to the extent that the Republican Party has a soul, to the extent that its coalition is able to agree on a limited number of things and prioritize them and try to get them done no

matter what, those are the three things. And those are things, to be fair to him, that Paul Ryan supports deeply. He's a deep believer that this country is overtaxed. He said actually to Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, in public. So Medicaid, sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate. We've been dreaming of this since I've been around, since you and I were drinking at of keg. So, I mean, these are things that he believes are good. What is galling about it is that after the total catastrophe on a policy level of the Bush administration, Ryan rose to power saying that he was going to make the Republican Party something different, that lessons had been learned. He wrote in his book, Young Guns, that they had lost a true faith. But now they had rediscovered it. They were going to be something new. They were going to be the thing that he said they were. And that just wasn't true. How did Paul Ryan fail to implement

his agenda that he had, you know, dreamt of for years when he had the House, the Senate, and the presidency? I spent a lot of time talking to people about this and thinking about this, because I was a journalist who covered Ryan's reboot and his early budgets. And, you know, these are budgets that I disagreed with. But I did take Ryan more or less at his word that the things he was saying he wanted to do were the things he wanted to do, that he was really genuinely worried about debt and deficits. And so I think the hard question that I don't quite know how to answer with Ryan is, was he insincere? Or when he was in a position of leadership, did he just default to the lowest common denominator among Republicans and justify it to himself? I can tell you the answers his

defenders give, the answers his critics give, but in the end, I don't think any of them really matter. Paul Ryan did what he did. We are in our lives, but particularly in positions of political leadership, we are our choices. We are the decisions we make. Paul Ryan clearly had the power to make different decisions than he did. And so he is the decisions that he made. Early in my life, I wanted to serve this house. I thought this place was exhilarating because here you can make a difference.

If you had a good idea, if you worked hard, you could make it happen. You could improve people's lives. To me, the House of Representatives represents what's best of America, the boundless opportunity to do good. But let's be frank. The House is broken. We're not solving problems. We're adding to them. Only a fully functioning house can truly represent the people. And if there were ever a time for us to step up, this would be that time.

I reached out to Paul Ryan's office to ask if he would be available to comment on this episode. Understandably, his people said that he would be otherwise engaged today. But here's hoping he has some time in the new year. Ezra Klein is the host of The Ezra Klein Show. It's a podcast. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This one's called Today Explained. Your toothbrush starts at just $25. Your first set of refills is free. After that, they're $5 every three months. And you can find out more about the Quip at getquip.com slash explain.

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