"Young Guns" Book Touts GOP Future

Three rising GOP stars are launching a critique of a their own party, while offering a new way forward, in a tome that reads more like a case for a new GOP leadership team than a party agenda.

In “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders,” Reps. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) rip the old ways of their own party while promising a new direction for the GOP.

“We are a new generation of Republican leaders eager to put our past sins behind us,” Cantor writes, of a party he says was “on the Bridge to Nowhere.” “We got what we had coming.”

Tellingly indicative of their vision of the future of the GOP, House Min. Leader John Boehner merits only 3 mentions in 191 pages. Pres. George W. Bush earns just 4 references, the same number as TN 08 candidate Stephen Fincher (R).

Each Young Gun gets a 3-chapter section to himself — Cantor flagellating the GOP and promising a new way forward, Ryan offering policy prescriptions and McCarthy touting some of the candidates he’s helped recruit as a top NRCC official.

Ryan’s controversial “Roadmap for America’s Future,” which Dems have jumped on as evidence the GOP would slash entitlement benefits in a harsh effort to control the federal debt, plays a central role. And both parties, Ryan says, have misled the public over the dangerous state of the country’s financial picture.

Dems have attempted to portray Ryan’s plan as the default GOP agenda, in an effort to convince voters the minority party wants to cut entitlement benefits. And while some GOPers have disavowed the plan, neither Cantor nor McCarthy say a word about it.

Yet the usual fiery partisan rhetoric is out in full force. “‘There was the New Deal, the Great Society, and now we are completing the vision of transforming America into what it needs to be,'” Cantor quotes a liberal as saying. He adds his opinion: “And that means is turning the Constitution on its head, forgetting about the ideas of equal opportunity.”

McCarthy, the political wonk of the 3, spends his time highlighting key candidates he’s helped recruit this year. McCarthy talks up Fincher; WI 07 candidate and “world-champion lumberjack athlete” Sean Duffy; CO 04 contender Cory Gardner; Rep. Charles Djou (R-HI); AL 02 candidate Martha Roby (R); and IL 11 candidate Adam Kinzinger (R).

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