After an early workout on the morning of March 12, 2014, Paul Ryan called in to a nationally syndicated talk radio show hosted by one of his many old mentors, Bill Bennett. Ryan had recently given a speech on what he had learned so far during his poverty tour, and he’d agreed to come on Bennett’s show and elaborate on his observations. He was still struggling with his transition from the role of modest, observant student during his visits with Woodson to authoritative poverty expert in Washington, and the uneasiness came through on the radio. It wasn’t long before Ryan’s sensitive tone began to strain under the demands of a skilled partisan interviewer.
“You lost your dad at an early age,” Bennett said during the show. “Who taught you how to work?”
Ryan replied by talking about his mother’s strong example, and the influence of his tight-knit family and network of friends in Janesville—but that wasn’t the answer Bennett was looking for.
“But, I mean, a boy has to see a man working, doesn’t he?”
“Absolutely,” Ryan responded. “That’s the tailspin or spiral that we’re looking at in our communities… We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
The assault from the Left began immediately. The liberal website ThinkProgress posted a portion of the transcript under the headline “Paul Ryan Blames Poverty on Lazy ‘Inner City’ Men.” Eager to advance its scoop, the site then began sending its story to Democratic congressional offices, asking for reaction quotes. Soon Representative Barbara Lee, Ryan’s Democratic colleague on the House Budget Committee, released a blistering statement calling the congressman’s comments “a thinly veiled racial attack,” and charging that “when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says ‘culture,’ they are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’” Nancy Pelosi’s office piled on, dubbing Ryan’s quote “shameful, disturbing, and wrong.”
Ryan was stunned by the force and violence of the reaction. When he consulted the transcript of the interview later that day, he could see how he should have been more precise in his language—but did all these people really believe he was a racist?
Ryan’s phone rang, and he answered to find Woodson on the line, chuckling.
“Well,” Woodson said, “what you said was true, but I’m not so sure you’re the one who should be saying it.”
Ryan was defiant at first, so Woodson tried to explain the gaffe in terms that the congressman might understand: “It’s the difference between a coach berating a player and a fan berating a player. They can both have the same message for the same reasons, but with one, the player’s head is hung down, while the other gets punched out.”
At around 5:30 a.m. on a cold April morning a few weeks later, men began filing into Indianapolis’s Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church. They were ex-convicts and reformed drug dealers, recovering addicts and at-risk youth—a proud brotherhood of the city’s undesirables. Some of them liked to joke that if he were around today, Jesus would hang out with reprobates like them. On this cold April morning, they were getting Ryan instead.
He had been to this church early on in his poverty tour, but that was before his “inner-city” gaffe turned him into a poster boy for right-wing race-baiting. Now he stood self-consciously in the lobby, just trying not to screw up. Sporting khakis and a new-haircut coif, he clutched a coffee and chatted in a subdued manner with three besuited associates. Despite his discomfort, most of the men rambling in through the front door didn’t seem to recognize the wiry white guy loitering in their church. A few parishioners came up and introduced themselves to him, but most passed by, exchanging quizzical glances and indifferent shrugs.
After several minutes, a sturdy, smiling pastor named Darryl Webster arrived and greeted the church’s guest of honor.
“I appreciate you coming,” Webster said as he clasped the congressman’s hand. “You know, when you get up this early in the morning, it’s intentional.”
“Usually when I get up this early, I get up to kill something,” Ryan cracked.
The words hung uncomfortably in the air for a moment, this not being a congregation of bowhunters. Ryan hastened to clarify.
“This is the first time I’m getting up this early without wearing camouflage,” he explained.
The joke landed, the group chuckled, and Ryan shuffled toward the chapel, looking weary and uncertain.
Since his ill-fated radio interview, Ryan had endured an onslaught of criticism. Many on the left argued that Ryan’s comments were rooted in bigoted stereotypes about black men being lazy, and exposed a sinister streak of racism lurking beneath his Homecoming King of Congress act. Others accused Ryan of cynically using the remark as a “dog whistle,” meant only to be heard by his target audience of racist white conservatives. Ryan’s office had been flooded with press inquiries as serious Washington reporters asked communications director Conor Sweeney whether the congressman “really hates black people.”
In truth, what Ryan’s foot-in-mouth moment revealed wasn’t bigotry but a debilitating lack of experience in interacting with the urban poor and people of color—a problem that afflicted his party at large. Ryan wasn’t racist, nor was he trying to curry favor with racists; he was a tone-deaf white guy who had never developed the vocabulary required to talk about race and urban issues, because as a professional Republican he never had to. While he had always gone through the motions of minority outreach, Ryan still hailed from a hometown where “diversity” meant neighbors swapping genealogical trivia about their Swedish and Norwegian ancestors. (According to the 2010 census, the population of Janesville was 91.7 percent Caucasian.)
Now Ryan was receiving his sensitivity training on the job—and it was a frustrating experience. “Dog whistle,” he grumbled to me at the time. “I’d never even heard the phrase before, to be honest with you… When I think of ‘inner city,’ I think of everyone. I don’t just think of one race. It doesn’t even occur to me that it could come across as a racial statement, but that’s not the case, apparently.”
If the outrage over his gaffe had brought Ryan a heightened degree of self-awareness, it had also infected him with a persistent strain of insecurity. At Emmanuel Missionary, he was endlessly preoccupied with his diction, prone to halting self-censorship, and acutely conscious of his own out-of-placeness. Like a singer who suddenly discovered his lack of relative pitch while onstage, Ryan was now worried that every note he belted out was off-key. It was a humbling experience to a guy who had been a few hundred thousand swing state votes short of the vice presidency.
The congressman followed Pastor Webster and Woodson into a spacious, warmly lit chapel, where about a hundred men were sitting in pews, cheerfully chattering as they waited for the proceedings to begin. Woodson introduced Ryan to Ken Johnson, a stout man with an eye-popping cross swinging from his neck, who served as the chaplain for the Indianapolis Colts.
Johnson’s eyes narrowed as he came face-to-face with Ryan. “I know you,” he said, trying to remember from where. “Are you…”
“I’m Paul.”
Nothing.
“I’m in Congress,” Ryan tried.
“Oh,” the chaplain said tentatively. “Yeah. Okay. I guess that’s how I know you.”
“Back home, I just tell people I’m the weatherman.”
When it came time for the service to begin, Ryan took a seat in the front row next to a small gaggle of aides and allies. They were there to observe a “boot camp” that Pastor Webster hosted for the men of Martindale-Brightwood, a rambling stretch of concrete and crumbling houses on the northeast side of Indianapolis. Like many of the places Ryan had been visiting, the neighborhood had long ago been poisoned by drugs, bloodied by violence, and starved of cash. Webster’s ministry focused on helping the community’s underachieving dads, husbands, and sons to get off drugs, fix their marriages, write résumés, and (with the ministry’s vouching) land jobs with suburban business owners. Every couple of months, Webster invited the men to a series of early-morning spiritual workouts, where they shared testimonials, listened to uplifting sermons, and chanted refrains in unison, like “You’ve got to know yourself to grow yourself” and “Life is in session. Are you present?” Since 2005, Webster had put nine hundred men through the program, and nearly 70 percent of them had overcome an addiction, according to the church.
Ryan sat practically motionless as the service progressed, one of his long arms draped over the back of the pew, his eyes fixed intently on whoever was speaking, his angular face registering only the faintest reactions to the sermons.
Woodson delivered an impassioned speech about African Americans taking responsibility for their communities. “In black America, we have a 9/11 every six months,” he declared. “Which means that three thousand young black men are being killed every six months.”
As the audience erupted with “Mm-hmm”s and “Yeaaah”s and “That’s right”s, Ryan turned his eyes downward and mouthed, “Wow.”
Woodson continued, “And that’s not gonna change by changing whoever’s president. It’s gonna be changed on the ground, by boot camps like this around the country.”
Later, in a sermon about redemption, Pastor Webster illustrated his message by encouraging the congregation of former criminals and gangbangers to remember their lives on the street. “How many of y’all have got some nicknames?” the pastor asked. “You got some nicknames you used to live by. What was your nickname, Thomas?”
A man shouted out from one of the pews, “Cat!”
“Aw, no,” Webster responded, grinning. “I never knew that. Does that mean you was a cat daddy?”
The men laughed knowingly, and Ryan laughed carefully.
At one point, Ryan was invited to speak. He kept his remarks brief. “Look,” he said. “I have a lot of humility right now. I just want to—I’m here to learn. I’m here to listen.”
Near the end of the service, Webster invited the audience to stand for a song, and Ryan rose with them. A two-man band on the stage began to play as lyrics scrolled across projector screens hanging on the walls. Most of the men were familiar with the routine; Ryan clearly wasn’t. Still, he bent his arms in the position of “receiving” like everyone else, and began gently swaying back and forth, as though he was slow dancing in middle school. He opened his mouth ever so slightly—just wide enough to let the words seep out—and started to sing.
Here’s my hands, oh Lord.
Here’s my hands, oh Lord.
I offer them to you.
As a living sacrifice.
The song had several verses, and with each stanza the chapel full of amateur baritones swelled with fervor. Ryan remained stone-faced, his eyes dutifully locked on the projector screens. And when the band eventually stopped and the pastor closed the meeting with a prayer—that God would bless Ryan with “understanding as he crisscrosses the country”—the congressman’s voice seemed to grow louder than it had been all morning as he said “Amen.”
Hours after the service, Ryan was still self-conscious about how he had performed during the devotional. “I’m so goofy with that stuff,” he said. “It’s just not my thing. I’m Catholic!”
The uproar over Ryan’s “inner-city” comments threw into sharp relief the sheer audacity of his mission to transform the GOP into champions of the poor. He felt as though he had charged headfirst without a helmet into a bitterly entrenched battle on unfamiliar terrain, zealously and clumsily fighting for a segment of the American public that Republicans hadn’t reached in generations. And he was concerned that all the demagoguery he was now experiencing would prevent his fellow Republicans from joining the cause.
“He knows this kind of crap is the price of admission when you challenge the Left’s perceived political monopoly,” one Ryan adviser told me amid the hailstorm of criticism. “But the 2012 experience was very helpful in thickening the body armor. I think the bigger worry is what sort of signal it sends to would-be reformers… It can be really dispiriting.”
What made it more daunting was Ryan’s realization that this probably wouldn’t be the last time he said something dumb or insensitive as he tried to build inroads to the urban poor. It was just the nature of the project: if he had any chance of advancing a conservative antipoverty agenda, he would have to fight and fumble his way through a thousand little gaffes, missteps, and screwups. “What I learned is that there’s a whole language and history that people are very sensitive to, understandably so,” Ryan told me. “We just have to better understand. You know, we’ll be a little clumsy, but it’s with the right intentions behind it.” It would be frequently awkward and occasionally humiliating, but it was also better than staying on the sidelines.
This was Ryan’s attitude when he walked into a closed-door meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus on April 30, 2014. The caucus had invited him to its meeting shortly after his radio interview, and his initial instinct had been to make peace with his colleagues by profusely apologizing and lathering on his trademark flattery.
But when Woodson heard about the invitation, he urged Ryan not to waste time with mea culpas. This was a rare opportunity to talk to his partisan opponents about poverty, outside the reach of TV cameras and buzzthirsty pundits. He should embrace the inherent ideological friction and speak his mind bluntly—not reach for a “Kumbaya” hugfest.
“He was expecting to get his ass kicked, and I told him, ‘Don’t go in there with your hat in your hand,’” Woodson later told me. “I coached him on that. I said, ‘You know, first of all, you need to recognize that you have visited more poor black communities than any of them have.’ I told Paul, ‘Never play defense.’ I don’t have any defensive plays in my playbook. I’m all attack, all the time.”
Ryan took his advice, and began girding himself for a knock-down, drag-out fight with a bunch of lawmakers who had spent the past several weeks calling him racist on MSNBC. He wouldn’t defend the phrasing of his now-infamous comments, but he decided he wouldn’t apologize for them either. Instead, he was prepared to offer a vigorous defense of his conservative vision for fighting poverty—and that included addressing the toxic culture created by society’s isolation of the poor.
To Ryan’s surprise, though, the tone of the meeting was decidedly subdued. After offering some mild criticism of what he had said on the radio, the lawmakers dropped the subject—and the made-for-cable bluster—and earnestly questioned him about his trips into poor urban neighborhoods. Ryan was able to plead his case for decentralized, homegrown poverty cures, and tell some powerful stories about the people on the ground making a difference in the communities he’d visited.
Still, he and his black Democratic colleagues couldn’t find much common ground on policy. The lawmakers remained dismayed at the deep cuts to federal social programs Ryan called for in his budget, and they believed his austere fiscal proposals represented an irreconcilable tension with his stated concern for the poor.
Describing the meeting afterward to reporters, caucus chairwoman Representative Marcia Fudge said that while Ryan claimed his observation about inner-city culture was merely inarticulate, “his policies belie that and basically say that he believes what he said.”
The question of what Ryan truly believed was at the heart of the controversy surrounding his outreach and his “inner-city” gaffe, and it was one that had trailed him through his entire career. But now, after years of having his personal motives dissected and held up for public inspection by all of Washington, he was growing tired of it. What Ryan believed was that the best way to help the poor was to scale back the massive federal programs and empower a diverse constellation of Emmanuel Missionary–like programs, each one of them tailored to its specific community.
Was that really so sinister?
Later that year, when the House committee that Ryan chaired released the Republicans’ 2014 budget without any of his antipoverty proposals factored in, his critics pounced. The liberal New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, one of Ryan’s most prolific antagonists in the commentariat, wrote that the omission “reveals something very deep” about him: “His policy vision is fundamentally impossible.”
Ryan defended himself at the time, telling me, “I’ve got two roles. I’m chairman of the House Budget Committee, representing my conference… and I’m a House member representing Wisconsin, doing my own thing. I can’t speak for everybody and put my stuff in their budget. My work on poverty is a separate thing.”
But many found this argument unconvincing—including his own poverty Sherpa. The truth, Woodson believed, was that Ryan was growing tired of the limitations imposed by the budget process—and the politics of Capitol Hill—as he spent more time visiting with the poor outside the Beltway. “He wants to spend less time with budgets, less time arguing in Congress, and he’s desperate to spend more time with us,” Woodson said. “I think he’s tired of it; I think he finds it a little tedious. It’s just not how Paul defines who Paul Ryan is anymore.”
As 2016 neared, Ryan would continue to answer questions about whether he planned to run with vague, I’m-thinking-about-it language that left the door open. Polls showed him in the top tier of Republican presidential prospects, and many assumed that if he entered the race the nomination would be his for the taking. And yet, for the first time in his life, Ryan was starting to think about getting out of politics altogether.