Department of "Huh?!": Paul Ryan Campaign Message
Great to correct the record, but exactly where did the working class image of a guy that nobody out of DC had heard of 2 weeks ago come from?
John "Sly" Sylvester, a radio commentator and Democratic operative in Madison, Wis., was dining at a Mexican restaurant in Washington with then-Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold about 20 years ago when a young Paul Ryan walked up. "He was our waiter," Sylvester said. Feingold knew Ryan's late father and, as they chatted, Ryan "said he even used to listen to my show when he was a kid," Sylvester recalled. Examples like that have helped Ryan, soon-to-be the GOP's vice presidential nominee, burnish his credentials as a youthful working-class guy.
"I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, when I was flipping burgers at McDonald's, when I was standing in front of that big Hobart machine washing dishes, or waiting tables, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life," Ryan recently told a crowd at a high school in suburban Denver. "I thought to myself, I'm the American dream on the path or journey so that I can find happiness however I define it myself."
It drew big applause.
And yet Ryan, 42, was born into one of the most prominent families in Janesville, Wis., the son of a successful attorney… grew up in a big Colonial house on a wooded lot, and his extended clan includes investment managers, corporate executives and owners of major construction companies….
After graduating in 1992 from Miami University, a public college in Ohio, he went to work as an intern and then as a committee professional staffer on Capitol Hill for Sen. Bob Kasten, a Wisconsin Republican, who was defeated that same year by Feingold. When Kasten was voted out, Ryan lost his job. He went to work at the Tortilla Coast restaurant on Capitol Hill, where he ran into Feingold. In 1993, he left behind his hourly job and began as a speechwriter at Empower America, the think tank formed by former congressman and George H.W. Bush Cabinet secretary Jack Kemp and other conservatives, according to a Ryan campaign spokesman.
The spokesman said people could interpret the candidate's messages about his youth "however they like, but I don't know that I'd say it's a message of humble beginnings. Rather a message of hard work and upward mobility. And, of course, work was also important as a young man with the passing of his father while still in high school."
But there was also more to it than work. Ryan's rise to political power and financial stability was boosted by family connections and wealth. The larger Ryan family has repeatedly helped the candidate along in his career, giving him a job when he needed one and piling up tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.
In the year after his father's death, Ryan's maternal grandmother set up the Ryan-Hutter Investment Partnership, which remains an important part of Ryan's finances with assets of up to half a million dollars, according to the congressman's 2011 financial disclosure statement. Ryan continues as the general partner running the entity for the family.
