House speaker Paul Ryan’s address Wednesday was billed as a disquisition on the “state of American politics.” But it was less an assessment of our politics than Ryan’s own optimistic prescription for improving it. With references to his mentor Jack Kemp and a time when members of Congress “took our jobs very seriously,” the speech might as well have been titled, “Make American Politics Great Again.”
“I have made it my mission as speaker to raise our gaze and aim for a brighter horizon,” he said. “Instead of talking about what politics is today, I want to talk with you about what politics can be. I want to talk about what our country can be, about what our Founders envisioned it would be.”
Ryan’s speech was ostensibly for the benefit of the 250-plus Capitol Hill interns convened in the House Ways and Means committee hearing room. But the several journalists in attendance and highly promoted online livestream of the event suggested Ryan wanted to speak to a larger audience.
“He’s the highest-ranking Republican in Washington,” was how a Ryan aide put it. “And he knows it.”
And what of the de facto highest-ranking Republican outside of Washington, Donald Trump? His name was never mentioned, but Ryan made an implicit contrast between his vision and that offered by the current GOP frontrunner for president.
“All of us as leaders can hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity and decency,” Ryan said. “Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations. Instead of playing the identity politics of ‘our base’ and ‘their base,’ we unite people around ideas and principles. And instead of being timid, we go bold. We don’t resort to scaring you, we dare to inspire you. We don’t just oppose someone or something. We propose a clear and compelling alternative.”
The barely concealed subtext of Ryan’s speech was that Ryanism, at least as an approach to the practice of politics, is a “clear and compelling alternative” to Trumpism. A day after Trump suggested he would reveal some embarrassing secret about the wife of his rival Ted Cruz, Ryan called for leaders to hold themselves to “the highest standards of integrity and decency.” In a race where Trump has made up schoolyard-style nicknames for his opponents and has called for punching protesters “in the face,” Ryan says, “We don’t shut people down. If someone has a bad idea, we tell them why our idea is better. We don’t insult them into agreeing with us. We try to persuade them.” Trump may be the least self-reflective person in public life, but in his speech Ryan rebuked himself for not always living up to the ideal he espoused.
“There was a time when I would talk about a difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits,” said Ryan. “But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong. ‘Takers’ wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don’t want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point. So I stopped thinking about it that way and talking about it that way.”
“But I didn’t come out and say all this to be politically correct,” he added, perhaps anticipating a Trumpian rejoinder. “I was just wrong.”
It felt at times that Ryan was speaking as a part of and on behalf of a completely different political party than Trump’s—maybe even a different political universe. He recalled fondly the mentality of Kemp, for whom Ryan worked in the 1990s.
“Long before I worked for him, Jack Kemp had a tax plan that he was incredibly passionate about,” Ryan said. “He wasn’t even on the Ways and Means Committee and Republicans were deep in the minority back then. So the odds of it going anywhere seemed awfully low. But he was like a dog with a bone. He took that plan to any audience he could get in front of. He pushed it so hard that he eventually inspired our party’s nominee for president—Ronald Reagan—to adopt it as his own. And in 1981 the Kemp-Roth bill was signed into law, lowering tax rates, spurring growth, and putting millions of Americans back to work.”
The path for Kemp-Roth was a model Ryan says his current conference of House Republicans wants to adopt. “All it took was someone willing to put policy on paper and promote it passionately,” he said.
The intent was a call to action, but as Ryan gazed out at the gathered interns and said the words, they sounded wistful. Ever the optimist, Ryan’s speech continued to build on a recurring theme of his speakership, a “confident America.” But as Trump marches closer to winning the nomination and making his leadership in the party official, it’s hard to discern whether Ryan himself is as confident in the message he’s sending.
