Obama Seeking \'Political Conquest\' of G.O.P., Ryan Says

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the former vice-presidential candidate, said Sunday that President Obama was ignoring the nation’s problems, choosing instead to focus on the “political conquest” of the Republican Party.

“When you saw his speech, say, at the inauguration, it leads us to conclude that he’s not looking to moderate, that he’s not looking to move to the middle,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” “He’s looking to go farther to the left, and he wants to fight us every step of the way politically.”

Mr. Ryan, in his first major interview since the November election, also warned that more partisan gridlock was in store as lawmakers prepared to renew debate over balancing the budget and raising the country’s debt limit.

His remarks echoed those of other Republican leaders including John A. Boehner, the House speaker, who last week said Mr. Obama was seeking to “annihilate” the Republican Party.

Repulicans were put on the defensive after Mr. Obama’s inauguration speech, in which he laid out a starkly liberal vision for his second term, declaring his support for gay marriage and gun restrictions and for changes in immigration laws.

With his stature increased within the party, Mr. Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, will increasingly be expected to set the tone for Republicans, particularly on fiscal issues.

In a speech at a National Review Institute conference on Saturday, Mr. Ryan urged his Republican colleagues to “stick together and carefully pick our fights with President Barack Obama.”

“We can’t get rattled,” he said. “We won’t play the villain in his morality plays.”

On Sunday, in a stinging rebuke to Mr. Obama, he said that had Hillary Rodham Clinton beat him to win the Democratic nomination in 2008 and gone on to win the presidency, “we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now.”

“I don’t think that the president thinks that ! we actually have a fiscal crisis,” he said. “He’s been reportedly saying to our leaders that we don’t have a spending problem, we have a health care problem. That just leads me to conclude that he actually thinks we just need more government-run health care.”

But he acknowledged that the Republican Party needed to reach out to a broader cross section of Americans, and he signaled a willingness to compromise on some issues.

“We obviously have to expand our appeal,” he said. “We have to show how our ideas are better at fighting poverty, how our ideas are better at solving health care, how our ideas are better at solving the problems that arise in people’s daily lives.”

On immigration, he said he was hopeful that some kind of legislation could be passed this year, if Mr. Obama did not “play politics.”
“Immigration is a good thing,” he said. “But we need to make sure it works.”

He also said he supported background checks to keep guns out of the handsof criminals, but called for an approach that did not simply ban certain kind of weapons.

Asked what he thinks about a presidential run in 2016, he said, “I don’t.”

“I’ll decide later about that.”