From the Archives: A 26-Year-Old Paul Ryan Featured in The Washingtonian’s “Young Guns” List

On Saturday,
Mitt Romney named 42-year-old US Representative
Paul Ryan as his running mate, and while the ensuing news cycle was flooded with related stories,
we were struck by a few that mentioned Ryan as not being very well known. Well, let’s
hold it a minute. The beauty of being a magazine for and about Washington is that
we meet a lot of up-and-comers well before they step onto the national stage. Ryan
is a good example. Let us take you back 16 years, to when he was working on the Hill. In 1996 Juliet Eilperin wrote a Washingtonian article called “Young Guns,” which featured Ryan as one of ten people under 35
making a difference in Washington. Two years later he was elected to Congress from
Wisconsin’s first congressional district.

PAUL RYAN, 26, Legislative Director to Representative Sam Brownback

Paul Ryan, 26-year-old legislative director to Republican Congressman Sam Brownback
of Kansas, is busy eating fries and poring over résumés. Brownback’s decision to battle
appointed Senator Sheila Frahm, a fellow Republican, for Bob Dole’s Senate seat had
already caused Ryan to put in long hours finding replacements for aides like Brownback’s
chief of staff, who left to head the campaign. Now that Brownback has won the primary,
the hours aren’t getting any shorter.

Congress is not foreign territory to Ryan—he worked in the upper chamber briefly for
Wisconsin Senator Bob Kasten until Kasten lost his reelection bid—but the Wisconsin
native says he is happier with the pace of the House. Like many other influential
policy aides, Ryan spent his time after Kasten’s defeat in exile at a couple of conservative
think tanks—first at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, then as a policy analyst
for Jack Kemp at Empower America. He has continued to focus on financial concerns
for Brownback, a member of the Budget Committee.

Ryan’s strength, according to Kemp, is that he is “an activist conservative, not a
stick-in-the-mud conservative.” It’s an activism well suited to Brownback, who supported
an unsuccessful effort to abolish four Cabinet departments.

All the GOP agitation occasionally surprises even Ryan, who at times sounds like the
village elder among a group of rebels. “These freshmen toss out grenades, then throw
themselves on them” he says, reflecting on this last session’s upheaval. Though he
did not expect to win all the battles, Ryan insists that the 73 Republicans who first
took office in 1995 have achieved substantial progress. “We’ve shifted the terms of
the debate,” he says, noting that proposing to kill a Cabinet department makes it
a lot easier to trim its budget.

This article originally ran in the November 1996 issue of The Washingtonian. See the full PDF.