This month, as a handful of Republicans auditioned at town halls and on bus tours to be
Mitt Romney’s running mate, Representative
Paul D. Ryan joined a private conference call. For 20 minutes, he walked through his plan to cut government spending and bashed President Obama for weakening welfare work requirements.
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His audience: Several hundred field organizers for Americans for Prosperity, the
Tea Party-inspired group founded by the billionaire conservative philanthropists Charles and David Koch.
When Mr. Romney announced that Mr. Ryan would be his running mate, his campaign emphasized the congressman’s detailed knowledge of the
federal budget and his chemistry with Mr. Romney. Less well-known are Mr. Ryan’s close ties to the donors and activists who have channeled Tea Party anger into a $400 million political machine, financed by a network of conservative and libertarian donors that now rivals, and occasionally challenges, the Republican establishment behind Mr. Romney.
Mr. Ryan is one of a very few elected officials who have attended the Kochs’ biannual conferences, where wealthy donors sit in on seminars on runaway government spending and the myths of
climate change.
He is on first-name terms with prominent libertarians in the financial world, including hedge fund billionaires like Cliff Asness and Paul Singer, and spent his formative years immersed in the
Republican Party’s supply-side wing, working for lawmakers and conservative policy advocates like Jack Kemp.
He has appeared for years at rallies, town hall meetings, and donor briefings for groups like the Club for Growth, which spends millions to defeat Republicans deemed squishy on taxes and spending, and Americans for Prosperity, a grass-roots group focused on economic and budget issues that is now trying to channel Tea Party energy into a permanent electoral force. Its fourth chapter was founded in Mr. Ryan’s home state, Wisconsin.
Now Mr. Ryan could provide Mr. Romney with a critical political and intellectual bridge to the rising conservative counterestablishment represented by the Kochs and their allies, who are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and deploy thousands of volunteers to defeat Mr. Obama. Should Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan win in November, a constituency that has for years fulminated against the failure of Republicans to live up to their own principles could soon have a close — and powerful — friend in the White House.
“There’s three guys that we courted for president: Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, and Mike Pence,” said Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a national advocacy group closely allied with the Tea Party, who worked alongside Mr. Ryan when both were staff aides on the House Budget Committee. “Up until yesterday, there was a 100 percent commitment to fire Obama. There was not a lot of enthusiasm about Romney.” Mr. Daniels is the governor of Indiana, and Mr. Pence is a congressman from Indiana.
Mr. Kibbe added, “From a Tea Party perspective, the overwhelming response on all of our networks has been extremely positive.”
Mr. Ryan’s ties to that world began with a job at Empower America, a group founded by Mr. Kemp that ran “candidate schools” for aspiring conservatives and advocated for a flat tax and lower spending. As a rank-and-file congressman during the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Ryan advocated for the privatization of
Social Security, helping push the idea toward the Republican mainstream and cementing his reputation as a conservative intellectual.
Privately, Mr. Ryan would later say, he was also stewing over what he and other conservatives viewed as the Bush administration’s fiscal profligacy and ideological drift, including the addition of a drug benefit to
Medicare and, later, a bank bailout plan, the
Troubled Asset Relief Program. (Mr. Ryan voted for both.)
That dissatisfaction was shared by the Kochs, who in the middle of the last decade began organizing conferences of like-minded donors and founded Americans for Prosperity.
Mr. Ryan, who became House budget chairman in 2006, began attending and speaking at Americans for Prosperity events. In 2008, the Wisconsin chapter gave Mr. Ryan its annual “Defender of the American Dream” award. Mr. Ryan also began attending the Kochs’ annual donor seminars. Last spring, Mr. Ryan was a speaker at a “Hands Off My Health Care” rally organized by Tea Party leaders outside the Capitol, drawing enthusiastic applause.
In Congress, he emerged as a skeptic of mainstream climate change theory — opposition to which has been a top priority of Koch-affiliated activists and research groups — and a reliable vote against energy efficiency standards, including a House vote to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases.
The relationship helped Mr. Ryan’s campaign coffers as well as his career: the Koch Industries PAC has donated more than $100,000 to Mr. Ryan’s campaigns and his leadership PAC, more than has any other corporate PAC, according to a New York Times analysis of campaign records.
Mr. Ryan has also developed relationships with other people in the Koch orbit, like Mr. Asness, a libertarian-minded financier known for his open letters blasting Mr. Obama, and Kenneth Griffin, a Chicago hedge-fund executive: wealthy donors whose taste for number-crunching and policy minutiae match Mr. Ryan’s own.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When Charlotte first emerged as the top contender to host the Democratic convention, its lead cheerleader was James E. Rogers, the outspoken chief executive of the hometown utility, Duke Energy. He promised to be a public face and a private fund-raiser for the effort. 
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