Ryan's budget & the primary

David Brooks writes of Paul Ryan's budget & proposed privatization of Medicare:

The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race.

While I was inclined to agree with Brooks about Ryan's budget being picked up by the 2012 Republican field, it looks like it isn't actually going to be the case just yet. Ben Smith has a statement from Tim Pawlenty which puts distance between himself and Ryan's proposal:

Thanks to Paul Ryan in Congress, the American people finally have someone offering real leadership in Washington. President Obama has failed to lead and make tough choices his entire time in the White House. While the budget is going to be debated for several months to come, the more immediate issue we face is President Obama’s plans to raise the debt ceiling next month. That's a really bad idea. With over $14 trillion debt already, we should not allow Washington’s big spenders to put us further in the hole. We must get our fiscal house in order with real spending cuts and with real structural reforms that stop the spending spree before it bankrupts our country.

Pawlenty is essentially saying that Ryan's budget is serious, but isn't buying into it fully as his message vehicle for talking about the debt and spending cuts. Of course, Ryan's budget aims to solve the problems Pawlenty is saying, so this may be Pawlenty seeking to have his own brand with no substantive difference in policy. If you look at what little substance there is in Pawlenty's statement, it reads awfully like Ryan's premise.

I think the way to assess David Brooks' assertion about the coming ubiquity of Ryan's budget proposal within the GOP primary is to look for the actual substance and not for candidates' issues pages saying, "I will implement Paul Ryan's budget." Campaigns have to grow their own candidate's brand and that's harder to do when you're merely a cipher for a colleague's ideas.

Update, 2:46pm:

Both Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum have made favorable comments in response to Ryan's budget proposal.