Paul Ryan Has Ear of Washington's Conservative Establishment

Well, you would think so.

At the New York Times, "Conservative Elite in Capital Pay Heed to Ryan as Thinker":

WASHINGTON — With the debate over the federal deficit roiling last year, David Smick, a financial market consultant, held a dinner for a bipartisan group of connected budget thinkers at his expansive home here.

At the table were members of the city’s conservative policy elite, including Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard.

But that evening, none drew more attention than a relatively new member of that best-of class: Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and now Mitt Romney’s running mate, who spoke passionately about the threat posed by the national debt and the radical actions needed to rein it in.

“I thought, ‘This is the one guy in Washington paying attention,’ ” said Niall Ferguson, the Harvard economic historian and commentator, who spent some of the rest of that evening, along with Mr. Kristol, trying to persuade Mr. Ryan to run for president.

Much has been written about Mr. Ryan’s intellectual influences: canonical conservative thinkers like Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian economist, and Ayn Rand, the novelist and philosopher. Mr. Ryan’s enthusiasm for them dates at least to his days as a precocious undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio.

But since first coming to Washington in the early 1990s, Mr. Ryan has been closely tied to an intellectual world more concerned with the political agenda of low taxes, light regulations and small government than philosophical ruminations on work and freedom.

And since his emergence as the key Congressional Republican on the budget issue, Mr. Ryan has become a particular favorite of — and powerful influence on — the intellectuals, economists, writers and policy makers who are at the heart of Washington’s conservative establishment.

Mr. Ryan “is the good think-tanker-as-politician,” said Stuart Butler, the director of the Center for Policy Innovation at the Heritage Foundation, a right-of-center research institution. “When I’m having a discussion with Ryan, I’m talking to someone who knows the material as well as, if not better than, I do.”

More on that top link.

And following-up on yesterday, TMZ has this, "Paul Ryan - THE TOPLESS PHOTO."

RELATED: The deranged progs have been trying to smear Ryan as a slavish Ayn Rand follower, but the Objectivist Standard, a major outlet for Objectivist philosophy, issued a major corrective, "Paul Ryan Rejects Ayn Rand’s Ideas—In Word and Deed."

So much for the "reality-based" idiots.