Poster boy for the conservative policy elite

With the debate over the federal deficit roiling last year, David Smick, a financial market consultant, held a dinner for a bipartisan group of connected budget thinkers at his expansive home here.

At the table were members of the city’s conservative policy elite, including Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard.

But that evening, none drew more attention than a relatively new member of that best-of class: Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and now Mitt Romney’s running mate, who spoke passionately about the threat posed by the national debt and the radical actions needed to rein it in.

“I thought, ‘This is the one guy in Washington paying attention,’ ” said Niall Ferguson, the Harvard economic historian and commentator, who spent some of the rest of that evening, along with Mr. Kristol, trying to persuade Mr. Ryan to run for president.

Much has been written about Mr. Ryan’s intellectual influences: canonical conservative thinkers like Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian economist, and Ayn Rand, the novelist and philosopher. Mr. Ryan’s enthusiasm for them dates at least to his days as a precocious undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio.

But since first coming to Washington in the early 1990s, Mr. Ryan has been closely tied to an intellectual world more concerned with the political agenda of low taxes, light regulations and small government than philosophical ruminations on work and freedom.

And since his emergence as the key Congressional Republican on the budget issue, Mr. Ryan has become a particular favorite of — and powerful influence on — the intellectuals, economists, writers and policy makers who are at the heart of Washington’s conservative establishment.

He also athletically argues for his policy ideas among the city’s policy elite in the white-tablecloth lunches, Capitol Hill meetings, private dinners and retreats where consensus gets formed.

Mr. Kemp “taught me that big ideas are the best politics,” Mr. Ryan told National Review. “They will always be challenged, and they will sometimes be controversial, but you have to do what you think is right, what you’re passionate about, and be a strong advocate for it. If you do that, you can shift the debate in a major way.”
[...]
The embrace by conservative policy elites began after Mr. Ryan became a prominent voice pushing for the privatization of the Social Security system during the George W. Bush administration. Despite his lack of seniority — and in no small part because of his already firm reputation as an economic policy thinker — Mr. Ryan became the top Republican on the budget committee in 2007 and then its chairman when Republicans retook the House in 2010.

In 2008, he released the first iteration of his budget, the “Roadmap for America’s Future.” It won plaudits in a right-of-center policy world that had gotten used to politicians watering down its ideas and acquiescing to a bloated federal budget through the Bush years...

“He’s worried about much more than the budget arithmetic, about the kind of government that we are going to have in America,” said Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center here and a favored policy thinker of Mr. Ryan.

“He’s a politician, not an O.M.B. economist,” Mr. Levin said, referring to the Office of Management and Budget at the White House.