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The men begin filing into the Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis around 5:30 a.m. They are ex-convicts and reformed drug dealers, recovering addicts and at-risk youth: a proud brotherhood of the city's undesirables. Some of them like to joke that if he were around today, Jesus would hang out with reprobates like them. On this cold April morning, they're getting Paul Ryan instead.
Ryan has been here once before, about a year ago, but most of the congregants rambling in through the front door don't appear to recognize the wiry white guy loitering in the lobby of their church. He is sporting khakis and a new-haircut coif, clutching a coffee as he chats with three besuited associates. A few parishioners come up and introduce themselves to him, but most pass by, exchanging quizzical glances and indifferent shrugs.
After several minutes, a sturdy, smiling pastor named Darryl Webster arrives and greets their guest of honor. "I appreciate you coming," Webster says as he clasps 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 cracks.
The words hang uncomfortably in the air for a moment, this not being a congregation of bowhunters. Ryan hastens to clarify. "This is the first time I'm getting up this early without wearing camouflage," he says.
This joke lands, and the collective tension leaks out of the group with a chorus of belly laughs. Webster, on a pastoral reflex, calls up a biblical metaphor.
"Or fishing!" Webster declares. "You know, the early bird gets the biggest fish. And in a real sense, that's what we're doing today. We're fishing."
"That's right," Ryan replies, reverently.
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Darryl Webster.
Facebook / Via facebook.com
This neighborhood could use more fishermen like Webster. The story of 46218 — a 9.5-square-mile stretch of concrete and crumbling houses on the northeast side of the city — reads like it has been plagiarized from a score of other poor urban zip codes: poisoned by drugs, bloodied by violence, starved of cash. Webster's antidote to his community's ills is a combination of Bible verses and counseling for the neighborhood's underachieving men. His ministry gets people off drugs, puts them through marriage counseling, teaches them how to write résumés, and helps them land good jobs by vouching for them with business owners. Every couple of months, he invites them to a series of early morning spiritual workouts, where they share testimonials, listen to uplifting sermons, and chant refrains in unison, like, "You've got to know yourself to grow yourself," and, "Life is in session, are you present?"
It may not sound like pathbreaking stuff, but Webster's results speak for themselves. Since 2005, he has put about 900 men through the program and nearly 70% of them have overcome an addiction, according to the church. Scores of local men credit Webster with helping them start their careers. The success of this homegrown, up-by-the-bootstraps approach is what has drawn Ryan here twice over the past year as he searches for a conservative cure to the curse of American poverty. It's a quest that has grown increasingly personal, and politically fraught, in recent months. It has also been humbling.
Ryan follows Webster into the spacious, warmly lit chapel, where about 100 men are sitting on paisley upholstered pews, cheerfully chattering as they wait for the proceedings to begin. He is introduced to Ken Johnson, a stout man with a large cross swinging from his neck who serves as the chaplain for the Indianapolis Colts.
Johnson's eyes narrow as he comes face-to-face with Ryan. "I know you," he says, trying to remember from where. "Are you…"
"I'm Paul."
Nothing.
"I'm in Congress," he tries.
"Oh…" the chaplain says, tentatively. "Yeah. OK. I guess that's how I know you."
"Back home, I just tell people I'm the weatherman."
When it comes time for the service to begin, Ryan takes a seat in the front row with a collection of aides and allies. He is accompanied this morning by Bob Woodson, the 76-year-old community organizer who first connected him with Webster; two Indianapolis businessmen who are helping Emmanuel Missionary with its work placement program; a personal aide employed by Ryan's political action committee; and a freelance videographer who is capturing footage of the visit for a vaguely defined future project that Ryan insists he will only "play a bit, bit part in." It's a decent-sized entourage, but even inside the buffer of companionship, Ryan seems acutely aware of his out-of-placeness here.
He sits practically motionless as the service progresses, his long arm draped over the back of the pew, his eyes fixed intently on whoever is speaking. The sermons prompt only the most muted reactions on his angular face. When Woodson declares in an impassioned speech that "in Black America, we have a 9/11 every six months," Ryan turns his eyes downward and mouths, "Wow." And when the pastor ribs some of the men in the audience for the nicknames they used to go by on the street, Ryan laughs along, carefully, with the congregation.
Near the end of the service, Webster invites the audience to stand for a song, and Ryan rises with them. A two-man band on the stage begins to play as lyrics scroll across projector screens hanging on the walls. Most of the men here seem familiar with the routine; Ryan clearly isn't. Still, he bends his arms in the position of "receiving" like everyone else, and begins gently swaying back and forth, like he is slow-dancing in middle school. He opens his mouth ever so slightly — just wide enough to let the words out — and he starts 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 has several verses, and with each stanza the chapel full of amateur baritones swells with fervor. Ryan remains stone-faced, his eyes dutifully locked on the projector screens. He sings about his "hands," his "heart," his "mind," and finally his "life." And when the band stops and the pastor closes the meeting with a prayer that God will bless Ryan with "understanding as he crisscrosses the country," the congressman's voice seems to grow louder than it has been all morning as he says "amen."
Hours after the final note is sung, Ryan is still self-conscious about how he performed during the devotional. "I'm so goofy with that stuff," he says. "It's just not my thing. I'm Catholic!"
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Paul Ryan / Facebook / Via Facebook: paulryanwi
Ryan's visit to Emmanuel Missionary is his 12th such venture into the world of urban poverty since last year. Over the past 14 months, the former running mate to Mitt Romney has toured the country, praying with heroin addicts in San Antonio, and hanging out with former gangbangers in Milwaukee. Like any savvy politician, he began this chapter of his career with a happy ending pre-written: On April 30 he will chair a House Budget Committee hearing loftily titled "A Progress Report on the War on Poverty: Lessons from the Frontlines," and sometime this summer he plans to release a package of conservative anti-poverty proposals that will be trumpeted as the culmination of his work with the poor. His admirers will no doubt use the occasion to celebrate him as a forward-thinking Republican visionary. He will make the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows. Political reporters will write stories about his rising stock in the 2016 campaign.
But for all the partisan fanfare that awaits, Ryan does not exude the confidence of a man who has it all figured out. His immersion into a world that few in the D.C. political class dare to visit has left him humbled and a bit unnerved — uniquely aware of the scale of his project, and not entirely certain of the way forward.
He also knows how it looks. There is a long tradition in American politics of campaigning in Harlem to win votes in Westchester, and more than one critic has accused him of using disadvantaged people of color as stage props in his political ascent. He's sensitive about this perception, and moves to preempt it almost immediately after we meet in the predawn hours at a downtown Marriott Courtyard, where it's still too early for the mini-muffins and microwavable breakfast sandwiches. I am the first reporter he has allowed on one of these trips, and he spends a good deal of time encouraging me to ignore him.
"This story isn't about me," he tells me. "It's about Pastor Webster and the work he's doing in this community. I'm just an observer."
This is Ryan's trademark Midwestern modesty on full display, the same characteristic that requires him to express aw-shucks puzzlement at the strong feelings his politics inspire. "I don't see why people give such a flip about me," he says. "I'm just a guy in Congress!" But he is also a deeply polarizing figure in Washington and beyond, a fact that has largely filtered the responses to his newfound passion for the poor into two categories: swoons and sneers. The reality is that Ryan, like most politicians, operates in the reality somewhere in between House of Cards and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and his political transformation — from right-wing warrior-wonk crusading against the welfare state, to bleeding-heart conservative consumed with a mission to the poor — is one of the most peculiar, and potentially consequential, stories in politics today.
Ryan is doing something rather unprecedented for a Republican: He is spending unchoreographed time with actual poor people. He is exposing himself to the complexities of low-income life that don't fit in the 30-second spot, the outlay spreadsheet, or the stump speech applause line. He is traveling well outside his comfort zone — and it has been uncomfortable.
The inherent friction of this effort came into full view last month when Ryan appeared on a conservative talk radio show to present the findings from his excursions into the forgotten cracks and crevices of American society. He was discussing the challenges of fatherlessness in underprivileged communities when he made the gaffe that launched a thousand think pieces: "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 of the culture of work," he said. The liberal punditocracy pounced, accusing him of winking at racists by subtly perpetuating a stereotype that African-American men are lazy. He was branded a dog-whistler, a micro-aggressor, a race-baiter. Rep. Barbara Lee issued a statement calling her House colleague's comment "a thinly veiled racial attack," and declaring, "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, calling Ryan's remark "shameful, disturbing, and wrong." Serious political reporters began calling Ryan's office to ask if the congressman "really hates black people," according to one aide. He eventually engaged in the requisite walkback, admitting his comment was "inarticulate," and taking pains to clear the air with Lee and the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus.
But a month later, Ryan still chafes at the assertions that he is a bigot. While he is accustomed to being labeled a granny-killer for his proposal to overhaul Social Security, this was the first time in his career he had been stamped with the scarlet-letter "R."
"I thought I had been called every name in the book until now," he says, smiling morbidly. "I know who I am and I know who I'm not. And Barbara does too. She does." He adds, "If we're going to get to fixing this problem, we need to allow a good conversation to happen without, you know, throwing baseless charges at people."
When I ask him if he can understand how some people might have honestly interpreted his comment as a racial dog whistle, he thinks about it.
"Dog whistle… I'd never even heard the phrase before, to be honest with you," he says. The admission isn't meant as a dodge, or an excuse. He hails from a state where "diversity" means white people swapping genealogical trivia about their Polish and Norwegian ancestry — his hometown of Janesville, Wis., is 91.7% Caucasian, according to the 2010 census — and he is coming to terms with the fact that he is not equipped with the vocabulary of a liberal arts professor. The fallout from his gaffe has been a "learning experience," he says, one that he predicts conservatives will have to go through many more times if they are serious about building inroads to the urban poor.
"We have to be cognizant of how people hear things," he says. "For instance, 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… What I learned is that there's a whole language and history that people are very sensitive to, understandably so. We just have to better understand. You know, we'll be a little clumsy, but it's with the right intentions behind it."
If the episode has brought Ryan a heightened degree of self-awareness, it has also infected his rhetoric with a persistent strain of insecurity. He is like a singer who has suddenly discovered his lack of relative pitch while on stage, and now worries that every note he's belting out is off-key. As we talk, he chooses his words with extreme care, and is prone to halting self-censorship.
At one point, as he tells me about his efforts during the presidential race to get the Romney campaign to spend more time in urban areas, he says, "I wanted to do these inner-city tours—" then he stops abruptly and corrects himself. "I guess we're not supposed to use that."
His eyes dart back and forth for a moment as he searches for words that won't rain down more charges of racism. "These…these…"
I suggest that the term is appropriate in this context, since it is obviously intended as an innocuous description of place. He's unconvinced, and eventually settles on a retreat to imprecision: "I mean, I wanted to take our ideas and principles everywhere, and try for everybody's vote. I just thought, morally speaking, it was important to ask everyone for their support."
It would be easy to use stuff like this to ridicule him for his tone-deafness, his white-guyness, his sheltered cluelessness. But Ryan, by his own admission, is receiving his sensitivity training in real time. He has charged headfirst into the war on poverty without a helmet; zealously and clumsily fighting for a segment of the American public that his party hasn't reached since the Depression-era shantytowns that lined the Hudson River were named after Herbert Hoover. It is frequently awkward and occasionally embarrassing, but it is also better than staying on the sidelines.
He is well aware that the audacity of his mission has driven some of his detractors nuts. Ryan, like everyone in Washington, claims that he pays no attention to his haters, yet somehow demonstrates remarkable familiarity with them. When I mention one of his most rabid critics in the commentariat, the liberal New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, he begins to chuckle. "That guy hates me," he says. "I don't even know what he looks like. Never laid eyes on the guy. But he does not like me."
Chait is just the most prolific soldier in an army of liberal political writers whose wonkery came into vogue at the same time Ryan's profile began to rise in Washington. The congressman's budget, which called for dramatically restructuring entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicaid in order to reach a balanced budget, made him a natural villain in their writing, and over the years they have relentlessly prosecuted him with critiques that range from petty and hysterical, to serious and substantive.
When Ryan released his annual budget in the beginning of April, it lacked the poverty-related proposals he had supposedly been honing for the past year. Instead, it was largely a rehash of his past budgets, focused on shrinking the deficit by scaling back federal welfare and entitlement programs. One study by the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that two-thirds of his proposed cuts came from expenditures that benefit low-income Americans.
In a column, Chait quoted from a Washington Post report earlier in the year that said the upcoming Republican budget would "recommend a sweeping overhaul of social programs," and then argued that Ryan's apparent course reversal "reveals something very deep" about him: "His policy vision is fundamentally impossible."
Ryan says the Post story was actually just inaccurate, and that he had never planned to fold his work on poverty into this year's budget (a claim that matches what his office told me late last year). "I've got two roles," he says. "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 Ryan is fighting a well-drawn caricature of himself as a wolf in bro's clothing — a right-wing radical who disguises his agenda to dismantle the social safety net with an earnest Homecoming King of Congress act.
"I'm so used to that," Ryan says of the personal attacks. "It's just—" he pauses to think for a moment. "The key is you get thick skin, but not impermeable skin so that it changes who you are. You can't get crocodile skin. Then you're, like, a curmudgeon. Believe me, there are a bunch of those in Congress and I don't want to be that. I look at [former Democratic Rep. Dave] Obey, and [Republican Rep. Jim] Sensenbrenner, two guys from my delegation, and I'm like, their skin is so thick, it's impermeable. I can't let that happen to me."
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Eric Gay / AP
