Paul Ryan is an inconsistent person. He has long claimed to be a fiscal conservative and a budget hawk. This appears to me to be required when he is stumping for election in Janesville, WI. He is an upper class member of the Janesville society (four generations and owner of a well-established construction company he inherited) so he is required by class membership to profess to be a fiscal conservative and a budget hawk - as long as that attitude does not limit the ability of government to pay his company for government construction work.
He would have chosen those positions because he grew up in upper class local society, but his discovery of Ayn Rand gave him the justification he needed. Ayn Rand demands that society support the rich and afflict the poor. Ryan accepts this demand whole-hog. It is part of his core being, and he requires his staff to read Ayn Rand in order to share what he knows in his core being to be true.
Once elected to Congress, however, Ryan voted for TARP, Medicare Part D, and George Bush's wars. None of those were paid for. His Randian rant and his local social position got him elected to Congress, but to gain seniority and power in Congress he had to become a Republican Party hack.
Mark Kleiman describes Ryan this way:
As Randian, he loves anything good for the rich and hates anything good for the poor; that’s why he wants to shred the social safety net and spend all of the proceeds on tax cuts for the prosperous, thus not reducing the deficit at all. As a partisan hack (and closet Keynesian) he knows that deficit spending stimulates employment; that’s why he supports it under Republican Presidents and opposes it under Democratic Presidents, independent of the state of the business cycle.
Ryan's desire to cut the budget is based on his role as partisan hack. Ryan is an upper class twit who hates having Democrats running government. That Obama is Black only makes it worse for him. He'll cut the budget to any Democratic government. But he is also the owner of an inherited construction company, so the minute Republicans are back in office he will unleash the flood of construction money. (Democrats who want to increase employment will be forced to go along with him.) Ryan and his type (his class) will hate the fact that labor gains from this money, so he will also do whatever he can to weaken Unions.
This sounds quite schizophrenic, but it is allowed because both the public and the media have very short term horizons. No one can force him to be consistent over time. Still, Ryan is quite glib. (Dan Rather pointed this out on last night's Rachel Maddow.) Ryan can skate on any one interview.
The one other thing about Paul Ryan's public persona is his effort to use Catholic morality to enhance his social position. This might be significant, but it's not. Being a Catholic in Janesville is just another element of being a member of the dominant coalition of Janesville. It gives Ryan a language he can try to use to reach other conservative religious people, but it's not as important as his wealth and class status. It just gives him a set of symbols he can try to use to connect with the public. His misuse of those symbols has gotten him into trouble with the Catholic Hierarchy, so I don't expect him to try it again. Catholicism is not part of Ryan's core being the way Ayn Rand is.
As near as I can tell, this analysis gets at the full range of Paul Ryan's public persona. As long as he is in politics, this is what we will see.