Raise your hand if you’re surprised Paul Ryan wants to spend more time with his family.
As a “small government conservative” Ryan has spent essentially all of his adult life cashing government checks, (with those sweet, sweet government health care benefits). His ascension to national influence is due primarily to his deft cooperation with and service to Wisconsin’s and then the country’s wealthiest citizen benefactors. His promise to them has forever been two-fold. A: Repeated rounds of tax relief followed by, B: a dramatic gutting of social services, otherwise known as social spending “reform”.
Having delivered the former, in a package that guarantees a return to trillion-dollar deficits, he has in effect accomplished both, and can now dump the daily aggravation of his political gig in favor of a Tim Pawlenty/Norm Coleman style pay-off in the private sector, or put another way, by going to work directly for the .1%-ers who have kept him in DC for 20-plus years.
(Ryan achieves a fresh gutting of social services to poorer Americans by driving deficits up so high conservatives have fresh horrifying numbers to rage and rail that “spending is out of control” … once Democrats are back in power and red ink matters again.)
As loathsome as Freedom Caucus torch-carriers like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are, they are at least naked about their subservience to Robert Mercer-scale political “investors”. What’s always disgusted me about Ryan is his snake oil image of a serious, concerned public servant all the while he consents to the same noxious policies promoted by the truly shameless wing nuts of the modern conservative movement.
Very much like Newt Gingrich before him, Ryan is “what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.”
Besides seizing the cash-out phase of his career, Ryan, being another character who is all about self-serving political calculus, knows that campaigning as a Republican this year is not going to be any fun. Not with Donald Trump looking ever more like a delusional third-tier mob boss and anger at DC descending from swamp to sewer more intense than it has been in a century. Even as Speaker of the House, Ryan was not going to have a pleasant time out in public in his own district. Like Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis here in Minnesota, he knew public appearances with an actual cross-section of voters was going to be an extraordinarily perilous experience.
I’m still not convinced that a giant “blue wave” is going to sweep across the land this November. There are hundreds of millions in dark money available to spread any hysteria imaginable to prevent that from happening.
But clearly Ryan, the calculator, (aka “the zombie-eyed granny starver” TM Charlie Pierce), has read smoke signals on the horizon and decided that moving now to profiteer off his “public service” is a far better option than being screamed at and vilified across southern Wisconsin.