Ryan has been in the House of Representatives for 13 years and is the chair of the House Budget Committee.
He scored major points with the tea-party folks, when rejected the Bowles/Simpson financial proposition because it did not do effectively address entitlement spending, Social Security issues and the Medicaid disaster . Ryan is very popular with conservatives within the GOP and, for what it is worth, he is/was one of my "top three" choices for President along with Sarah Palin and Marco Rubio.
He was voted "prom king" and owned the title, "biggest brown nose" in his graduating class (high school).
He was born and raised in Wisconsin. He is an Irish Catholic with 67 cousins living in or near his hometown of Janesville (Wi). He is married and has three children and sleeps in his office during congressional sessions. He is blue collar, all the way.
This pick, on the part of Mitt Romney, proves his seriousness as to governmental reform. This GOP ticket is a tribute to Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and all of the tea-party nation. His selection is as bold a pick as Romney could have made and recharges the GOP base, as if such were necessary. More than this, it establishes a direct link between Reagan/Kemp conservatives and those conservatives who are now in [nearly] full control of the GOP.
As an indication of the excitement that will be generated by Ryan's elevation to "VP candidate," his twitter account took on 7,000 friends in the three minutes following his acceptance of this nomination.
Ryan's plan for fiscal reform will be "center stage," and will be opposed by a man, Barack Obama, who has a proven record of abject failure when it comes to national finances. You can't be more of a failure than to be the first president in history to have governed without an accepted budget statement for four full years. In fact, he is the first president to have failed to get a single vote four of his personal budget proposals.
Can you imagine the national debate with Paul Ryan on board? Someone who knows what he is talking about versus someone who cannot get a single member of his own party to sign on to his budget proposals and has failed to do so over the course of his entire term in office???