Paul Ryan: Obama second term 'big government in practice'

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan told a Republican gathering in Altoona Saturday night that Americans are witnessing “big government in practice” during President Obama's second term and many don't like what they're seeing.

Ryan, 43, an unsuccessful GOP vice presidential candidate in 2012, said voters heard “all of this soaring rhetoric and all of these promises and now we see what's happening” as the administration pushes a botched health care plan that threatens to do “real harm to real people.”

The eight-term congressman told about 800 Iowans who gathered to celebrate Gov. Terry Branstad's 67th birthday there are two ways to explain the unfolding Obamacare “spectacle” – “either they were being dishonest or they're just incompetent. Frankly, I don't know which one is the worst.”

Ryan, who chairs the U.S. House Budget Committee, said the problem he and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney faced on the 2012 campaign trail was they were arguing against big government “in theory” because the Obamacare law didn't take full effect until this year.

Now that it is practice, he said, people are realizing “the results are nothing close to the rhetoric that was used to sell them.”

“What we're realizing is that this is not all that it was cracked up to be,” he said. “I wonder if people who know now what they know would rehire these people again.”

Ryan said there are lesson to be learned from this experience and an opportunity for Republicans going forward if they who themselves to be “not the party of opposition but the party of proposition” in pushing for less government, lower taxes and personal responsibility.

He also said there is a lesson for Iowans who are first in the presidential selection process: “the next time you have a famous politician coming through Iowa … talking about big government, let's be a little more skeptical.”

Ryan said losing the 2012 presidential election was “very frustrating” and difficult to accept.

“It was a tough loss. It was tough for all of us. We were in a funk for a good six months because we made mistakes,” he said.

However, he said he and his family had a “very delightful experience” in 2012, and his first trip back to Iowa was both to deliver a Wisconsin "cheese-head" hat with a mustache drawn on it as a birthday present to Branstad and to thank “each and every” Iowan who “worked so hard” for the Romney-Ryan ticket.

At one point, he joked “Maybe we should come back and do this more often. People are really friendly here, I tell you.”

Ryan's appearance also was viewed as a 2016 exploratory trip in what several party attendees Saturday saw as a wide open race with a potentially large field.

“I don't think anybody can declare frontrunner status at this point,” said U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. “We really don't have presidential candidates yet. You have people that journalists are talking about running for president but I've never had anybody tell me that they're running for president.”

Grassley said Ryan will have name recognition that other candidates won't have, “and that's always a big help, but it takes hard work to be a candidate for president.”

David Oman of Des Moines, who served as co-chairman of Romney's 2012 Iowa campaign, said he spent time when Ryan and viewed him as “a straight shooter who's full of common sense.” He said Ryan has values and is principled but is willing to work across party lines. “That's what people these days,” he said.

Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Scott Brennan marked Saturday's occasion by issuing a statement saying: “Republicans like Terry Branstad and Paul Ryan keep promising Iowans something fresh and something to celebrate about – but all we keep seeing are the same stale, backwards policies of the past that Iowans don't like and Republicans don't win with.”

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