Paul Ryan: 'This is not who we are'

According to Paul Ryan, the passage of health care reform does not mean the fight is over. To the contrary, now the fight begins.

This is not who we are. Now the fight begins.

Robert Costa writes:

Paul Ryan Is Not Ready to Give Up on Health Care

After the vote, Ryan lays out a way ahead.

‘This is the closing of the first chapter of America’s health-care saga,” Rep. Paul Ryan says from his office, which is adorned with reminders of contests of the non-political kind: hunting mementos and a Green Bay Packers helmet. “We are witnessing the beginning of a whole new kind of health-care politics, the likes of which we have never seen before.”

Ryan, a 40-year-old Wisconsin Republican, says Republicans have a fight on their hands, and he is ready for combat. As Democrats scrambled this past week for votes, he’s been listening to Metallica on his iPod and strategizing about how best to counteract Obamacare. Sunday night’s passage, he says, “was a rude awakening and a big wake-up call,” but also a call to action for Americans — and, especially, for the GOP.

“We need to establish a set of metrics and benchmarks to measure the sector going forward, keeping a close eye on all of the Democrats’ claims,” Ryan says. “From cost to quality, we will need to be vigilant in making sure that their assertions are actually substantiated with facts, and I have every reason to believe they won’t be.” Repealing Obamacare should be the goal, he says, “but with the political plurality you need to do that — a new president, 60 senators, and a majority in the House — that is a pretty tall order.”


While Democrats celebrated a legislative victory last night, Ryan, the House Budget Committee’s top Republican, believes the GOP has “won the cost argument” on health care. “It is just intuitive,” he says. “We are going to insure everyone else in America and we are going to save money? That just doesn’t add up in people’s minds.”

What also does not add up is President Obama’s confidence that the American people are going to accept his health-care program and the vision it encapsulates — and that debate, Ryan says, has just begun. “Health care is really the issue that speaks to the relationship between the citizen and the government in America,” he says. “It shapes the fiscal trajectory and the economic trajectory. This whole debate has been a proxy fight about what kind of country America will be — whether we’ll become a cradle-to-grave welfare state or stay a free-market democracy. The Democrats who are being told that the worse is over should know that the battle has not even begun. It’s up to us to now bring the case to the American people — a real moral, philosophical, and economic case — asking about our values, our founding principles, and if we really want to move toward a Western European–style system.”

...“They’ve got a president here until 2013 and the votes in the Senate to support this for a few years, but it’s not over. As we work to repeal, we must recognize that we’re fighting a different and distorted progressivism. They want to hook people up to entitlements and delegate more power to unelected bureaucrats and technocrats to micromanage the economy — a government full of Peter Orzags. Yet their fatal conceit is also a rational gamble to establish a new culture of dependency.”

Ryan has established himself as a real leader.

He's the Reagan of the 21st century.

Fired up?