- otus
- August 11, 2012
AC
Gov. Mitt Romney is expected to announce Saturday morning that he's chosen 42-year-old Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Since 2008, the well-spoken Republican Congressman from Janesville, Wisconsin has emerged as a leading figure on the right and a champion of reduced government spending. Ryan has earned the admiration of conservatives for the tough, government-slashing budget proposals he's put forward since becoming chairman of the House Budget Committee last year. But when he first arrived in Washington as a freshman lawmaker in 1999 at only 28 years old, budget shrinking wasn't exactly in style. Ryan told the New Yorker that he was "miserable" during the George W. Bush years, when a Republican-majority Congress added $5 trillion to the debt in war spending, bank bailout, tax cuts, and other costs. But Ryan also usually voted with the majority at that time, though he put forward unsuccessful proposals to privatize Social Security and made other budget-slashing...