Say what you will about Ryan’s willingness to take on sacrificial lambs, he is not shy about pushing controversial proposals — and that’s a rarity in Washington.
“He is a guy without guile, without pretense. He likes to hang out with actuaries for relaxation,” conservative commentator and CNN analyst Bill Bennett said in an interview. Ryan worked for Bennett at Empower America.
And there’s more to Ryan than the D.C. wonk. He’s also a hunter who can target elk with a bow and arrow. And he’s an exercise buff — when in Washington, he works out each morning with some of his congressional colleagues using a grueling fitness routine called P90X. One favorite pastime: trekking the Colorado Rockies.
His devotion to fitness was spurred by the early death of his father at age 55 when Ryan was 16.
“I basically had to learn to sink and swim,” he recalled. “I did a lot of growing up very fast. And it made me take stock of who I am, what kind of person I want to be. It made me, I would say, very initiative-prone — live life to its fullest because you never know how long it is going to last.”
Not mentioned once in this piece about Paul Ryan being so popular is his favorable/unfavorable poll numbers, the most recent of which (that I could find, at least) indicate Ryan is in fact not especially popular. Puncturing another hole into CNN’s story is the fact that Ryan’s recent dip in unpopularity is quite clearly a consequence of his “Path to Prosperity.”
To be fair, it’s in the aggregate that Ryan loses his shine; as far as Republicans are concerned, he’s the bees knees.
Whether or not CNN is right in depicting Ryan as Washington’s prom king, I wonder if there really is anyone in the world who actually wants to read these kinds of piece. Besides the politician in question’s press agent, I mean.