In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week, Paul Ryan said the GOP party's principles are sound and "we shouldn't be ashamed of those."
Going into the election last November, Ryan often portrayed the contest as a grand referendum between competing worldviews, in which the American electorate could resolve a long-standing debate and choose between a Republican philosophy of individual liberty and free markets and (his words) a more collectivist Democratic vision of a European-style social welfare state.
"Where I think we fall down is we get distracted in petty partisan fights and we haven't done a good enough job of showing how these principles work in practice to solve problems, and how everyone in America no matter who they are, where they come from, what their current station in life is, benefits from them, and that's where we have our work cut out for us," he said.
