Paul Ryan's own path to prosperity - NBCNews.com

>>> until now, paul ryan , a wisconsin native, was known as a ho-hum policy wonk , more at ease giving chart-heavy speeches than prime time political addresses.

>> look at where we're headed. we are headed with a crushing burden of debt. the debt goes to double the size of the economy, then triple the size of the economy, to eight times the size of the economy.

>> the ayn rand devotee hardly shook things up when he played office. he played loyal party soldier and voted in favor of big bush era spending plans. according to a recent profile of the congressman, quote, ryan told me recently that as a fiscal conservative he was miserable during the last majority and is determined to do everything i can to make sure i don't feel that misery again. four years ago, ryan , using his policy skills and disarming demeanor, set out to slash spending. in the process he created a plan that would redefine the nation's social compact and overhaul the system of wealth distribution in america. initially his party ignored him with only eight republicans signing on to ryan 's road map for america's future. but then the tea party emerged and ryan 's budget proposals to turn medicare into a voucher system for future retirees, gut programs like medicaid and food stamps and give massive tax breaks to the wealthy became the defining policies of the republican party . just this past march, all but ten house republicans voted in favor of his budget blueprint. look how far paul ryan has come and look how far back he could take us. ezra, nothing wrong with being a policy wonk . is there such thing as a ho-hum policy wonk ? i feel that's undermining the importance of policy wonks. let's talk about how ryan got here. he has put forward an incredibly ideologically severe plan to paraphrase some on the right. how did he win the favor of the republican party ? is it just the tea party that gave him this currency?

>> no. i should say i have like a hipster's relationship to paul ryan . i liked paul ryan back before it was cool. now i don't think, back when eight republicans were signing on to the road map it was actually a much better, more interesting documents. the numbers added up better. there was a real plan to try to give more americans health care insurance and a significant component, cutting, trying to privatize social security . there are a lot of parts of it i didn't agree with but the numbers worked and it was a coherent vision of what to do next, if you were very, very conservative. in that way it was a good debate. what happened next is paul ryan 's budget chairman, then house republicans became, they got into the majority. the really key moment for paul ryan came back during the shut-down conversation of 2010 , because boehner wasn't getting his tea party freshmen to vote for something that would notch it down, they weren't willing to make the compromise and they fast-tracked the paul ryan budget and made it kind of the big, before that debate was over which nobody expected to unveil a budget before we figured out how to keep the government open and the idea was move the tea party over to this document, this long term document. don't get them obsessed with the small fight over 2010 spending. get them obsessed with how to do medicare and medicaid in the long term. but ryan made compromises in order to get the gop signed on. social security went out. the health care part went away. so it's not getting more people health care . then as it went on, he had to cut medicare less and now basically the plan is he is going to cut programs for poor people by vastly more than is plausible and more than is decent.

>> sam, you're in tampa. what is the expectation as far as ryan 's speech tonight? i'm not assuming we will hear a lot. we won't see a lot of flow charts and hear a lot about policy. we will presumably hear more about his growing up and background in wisconsin, his love of hunting.

>> i don't think he will do what ezra did and say i will vastly cut programs for the poor. that is not a smart political strategy. obviously he's going to talk about he's a budgets guy, he will talk about the need to tackle the deficit. i wouldn't be surprised if he talked about how things got away in the bush years. i think that's a way to pivot off of both bush himself and to create distance between the romney and bush ticket, even if it's insincere, knowing paul ryan 's voting record. but i was told that he's going to probably give a nod to foreign policy which is one of his weak parts because he just hasn't had much experience there. but you know, as these things go, expect a lot of platitudes, expect a lot of show and there's going to be hokiness as well.

>> platitudes and hokiness. must-see tv. thank you to sam stein in tampa, eric bates may get what he wants and hear the name george w. bush .

>>> coming up, the army corps