Paul Ryan for House Minority Leader

Patrick Ruffini and Hugh Hewitt have both had interesting posts aboot the youth vote and how the GOP needs to win them back. Roy Blunt (R-MO) stepping down as Minority Whip and clearing the way for Eric Cantor (R-VA) to take the #2 spot is definitely a start. I’d like to suggest one more…Paul Ryan (R-WI) for Minority Leader.

Ryan, 38, is a six-term congressman, former speechwriter for Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp, and was at least at one point rumored to be considered as John McCain’s running mate. More importantly, he’s one of the GOP’s young guns who has been sounding the alarm on how we need to “…take our timeless principles and apply them to today’s problems and be the reform party we used to be.”

(Plus, if you check out his Facebook page, the fact that he’s a Monty Python fan instantly makes him mad cool…I digress.)

There are two things that make me think he’s at least thinking aboot the position…

One is the fact that, just a few weeks ago, he suddenly decided to run a multi-million dollar TV advertising campaign…for a district he won with 64% of the vote. As a means of comparison, my congressman Pete King (R-NY) won with 64% of the vote and I think all he spent was a couple hundred bucks on road signs. So obviously Ryan was thinking bigger than Kenosha.

The other was the fact that he was the one congressman Fox News decided to interview on election night, and when asked if he was thinking of a leadership position, he dodged the question like you would if you were thinking aboot a leadership position…

I don’t want to get into personality issues about leadership. What I want to do is get into ideas. We can’t be afraid of our principles anymore. We can’t be afraid of taking political risks anymore. We can be afraid of taking on big ideas and going straight to the American people with them.

We’ve been — we’ve had too much political fear in our party, too many earmarks, no reform. That has to end. We’ve seen what that got us. Now it’s time for us to clean up our acts, our party, and go forward.

I won’t get into the personalities of who should lead this. Only that we have to go back to being that reform party that we used to be.

The clip is at the end of this post, along with one of him discussing his “Roadmap for America’s Future“. The GOP needs some new blood and bold ideas. Paul Ryan is the perfect combination of both.

Exit Quotation: “…the energy he would bring to the party and conservatives generally would be immediate. The first impact would be felt in the fund-raising coffers of an NRCC also led by a new face, probably Pete Sessions of Texas. If in two weeks a Ryan-Cantor-Sessions team begins the first of a weekly Thursday briefing on the issues facing Congress…the response from the grass roots would be huge.”