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Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie (6/28/2011)

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…. Yet despite its concerns about the deficit, the public is also deeply attached to Social Security and Medicare.

And that's why Republicans are so skittish about Ryan's plan. Indeed, it's not clear that many of his fellow GOP legislators are willing to sign up for Ryan's hard-core brand of fiscal responsibility. Electorally, his plan may be more of a problem for the GOP than a solution. To date, his proposal, which is actually an update of a plan he initially put forth in 2008, has a mere nine cosponsors—mostly conservative stalwarts. A number of prominent Republicans, including presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty and House Minority Leader John Boehner, have explicitly declined to support the proposal. At the same time, GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell, Michael Steele, and Newt Gingrich have all released statements staunchly opposing cuts to Medicare—the same sort of cuts that are crucial to Ryan's plan.

So Ryan's proposal is instructive not only because it clarifies the difference between liberal and conservative policy, which is that serious reductions in government mean serious reductions in popular entitlements; it's also instructive about the road ahead for the GOP.

Republicans are expected to see significant electoral gains in 2010, and those gains are likely to come amid boisterous criticism of President Obama's spending and deficits. Yet few GOP legislators are willing to point to specific programs they'd like to cut, much less draw up all-in-one, multidecade budgetary solutions. That Ryan actually is—and that the result is such a political hot potato—creates a potentially awkward situation for the GOP, which has been largely content to criticize Obama without offering a substantive agenda of its own.

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