“My favorite kind of people in politics,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview, “are people who have strongly held beliefs and fight for them. They’re in politics for the right reason.”
Second, Mr. Ryan appears to be the rare kind of guy who actually dreams of making Social Security solvent, rather than of using the issue to bludgeon opponents or get himself on television. While his own proposal for private investment accounts might be a deal-breaker for the White House, he identifies Social Security as an area where there is “clearly room for compromise” and says of his road map generally, “I’m trying to get the discussion to an adult level.”
Finally, in Mr. Ryan, the president might well find a generational and temperamental peer, just as Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich must have recognized in each other the same manic energy and grad-school nostalgia. Mr. Obama singled out Mr. Ryan at a visit with Republican House members last January, saying that he had read the road map and considered it a serious proposal. He joked then that while he had met Mr. Ryan’s “beautiful family,” he didn’t want to hurt the congressman’s political prospects by saying anything nice about him.
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