The Hill News

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) made the following remarks Thursday during a Q&A about President Obama's speech on deficit reduction with e21, a nonprofit economic research organization:

...I was expecting from actually speaking with some Democrats that it was going to be an olive branch speech, that we were going to see the president get engaged in the issue of our time, our fiscal crisis, offer some details and specifics. In particular, we thought he was going to offer some solutions on Social Security which I thought was going to be a concrete step in the right direction. And the impression we were given was that, you know, we had an agreement on the CR, hammered out agreement and we're going to build on that success going forward with debt limit in the budget and the rest.

So Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) and Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and I, members of the Fiscal Commission, members of Congress on the Republican side in the House went with a little bit of o! ptimism. And what we ended up finding out is we got front row seats to President Obama's reelection campaign speech. We basically realized fairly quickly that this wasn't about building bridges, it was about partisanship. It was about basically what his 2012 election speech is going to be all about.

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