Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, talks about an alternative Republican budget plan he is pushing in the House, Wednesday, April 1, 2009, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Paul Ryan may feel a bit like Don Quixote this week.
He's dreaming the impossible dream: Defeating the Democratic juggernaut and forging a federal budget that borrows less, spends less and creates more jobs than anything the Democratic leaders have come up with.
The dream might not be impossible, actually. But to call it simply difficult would be an epic understatement.
Ryan was point man for House Republicans on Wednesday, announcing an alternative to the Democrats' federal budget plans.
Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, had been given the task of writing the Republican budget.
The Democratic leadership is intent on ramming their budget through quickly, Ryan said. And it would seem there's nothing to stop the Dems, given their majority.
But Ryan has one hope: The Blue Dogs.
The Blue Dogs are fiscally conservative Democrats who might join the Republicans in pushing back against what they see as too much spending and too much taxing.
But the Blue Dogs were telling Ryan on Wednesday that they didn't have the votes to help. Some Blue Dogs were nervous about backing a Republican initiative, and they were getting pressure from their leadership.
"Right now, (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi is bringing people into her office and whipsawing them," Ryan said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
But that could change, and it's that "but" on which Ryan hangs his slim hopes.
Here's what Ryan is hoping for: The Republican and Blue Dogs join forces and hold off passage of the Democratic budget until after next week's Easter recess.
That will give people more time for the news media to scrutinize the Democratic budget, and that scrutiny will make fewer Democrats willing to vote for it, Ryan said.
Ryan also has left some bait in his budget: He's taken ideas from the Obama administration and included them in his budget. Good ideas, Ryan said, so why not use them?
"Our goal here is to show a different way forward but at the same time extend the olive branch and say, 'Please stop this endless borrowing and spending and work with us,'" Ryan said.
For Ryan, what hangs in the balance is no less than the future of the United States of America. Ryan said Japan tried to spend its way to prosperity in the 1990s and now faces staggering consequences. The same could happen here, he said, with our children and grandchildren inheriting a crippling debt.
Ryan's alternative would mean less spending, lower taxes and, he contends, more job creation. He said his budget was run through an economic model that predicted 2 million more jobs than the president's plan.
Democrats might point out that George W. Bush's administration also printed money like nobody's business and ask where Ryan was when his party was in power.
"I was proposing the same reforms. I was proposing budget-process reforms and entitlement reforms, and everybody who knows me knows that," Ryan said. He also voted against spending bills, he said.
Ryan admits his fellow Republicans worked against him at the time.
"The problem was, I was in the minority in my party, and I think we're getting to the point that I'm getting to be in the majority in my party on these issues," Ryan said. "The problem is, we're not in the majority (in Congress)."