Paul Ryan: Conflict inside the Republican Party are ‘signs of life’

And he put the best face on his party’s turmoil.

“We started this year with ruptures”.

“In the plainest terms I know, it is all on the line, so let’s act that way”, he said.

Some delegates at the Republican National Convention jokingly booed the speaker after his flopped analogy.

Ryan noted several fierce Big Ten rivalries, including between Ohio State and Wisconsin. “I’ve found other things to keep me busy”.

Ryan, known for his wonky affinity for crafting conservative policy, has been hesitant to fully embrace the bombastic Trump, even rebuking some of his statements as racist and anti-Semitic.

“I have so much great appreciation and respect and love for this guy…”, he said. It is Trump. We have to focus on keeping Hillary out of the White House. Not a chance. The Obama years are nearly over.

He would be asked constantly about Trump. These Republicans don’t want to draw too close to Trump, lest they alienate the large middle ground of the electorate that is extremely uneasy of a candidate they see as unsafe and unpresidential. “We’ve got being an opposition party down to a T. We need to be a proposition party”.

He praised the GOP for showing “signs of life” with its rambunctious primary, while he said the Democrats were going with the same-old with their nomination of Clinton.

“We have frank exchanges….”

“But then when one of us goes on to the Rose Bowl, we all root for each”.

Asked whether he would appropriate funds to actually build the wall, Ryan joked about Trump, ‘I think he’s going to go to Mexico’.

Across town, another serious-minded leader did no such thing.

“This is always hard for a principled conservative like Ryan to deal with the outsider Trump”, says national political pollster John Zogby of NY state. They could not be more different.

Only Trump’s wife, Melania, seemed to offer language more enticing to independents still on the fence over who to vote for this fall.

If Donald Trump is elected president in November, Paul Ryan will be watching over his shoulder.

“If they’ve gone through that Ryan platform very carefully and talked about the main points in it and they agree 95% of the time, I don’t know how many more times you can agree”, he said. “He’s endorsed him. What else is there to say?” said Conway. “And it’ll be better when Americans wise up and vote for Donald Trump”.

Ryan, however, has said his GOP colleagues are free to follow their conscience when it comes to Trump. You can get through four days with a little help from the mute button. But in the end – literally the last sentence of his speech – he brought it all together and uttered Donald Trump’s name for the first time. “Ohio is Middle America, but OH really is the determiner of where this country goes”.