Erskine Bowles, co-chair of President Barack Obama's budget-deficit commission, had unusual praise for Paul Ryan at a 2011 event, shown in a video posted to YouTube on August 12.
"I’m telling you this guy is amazing," Bowles said in the video, reportedly taken at a 2011 University of North Carolina event.
The past praise for Ryan and his budget plan is a stark contrast to his recent criticism of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's tax plan. Bowles also criticized Obama's plan at the time, saying nobody "took that budget very seriously":
“I always thought that I was okay with arithmetic. [Paul] can run circles around me, and he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion... The President came out with his own plan and the President, as you remember, came out with a budget, and I don’t think anybody took that budget very seriously. The Senate voted against it 97 to nothing. He, therefore, after a lot of pressure from folks like me, he came out with a new budget framework, and in that new budget framework, he cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years. And, to be candid, this $4 trillion cut was very heavily back-end loaded. So, if you looked at it on a 10-year basis and compared apples-to-apples, it really was about a two and a half trillion dollar cut.”
Below, a slideshow of politicians' reactions to the Paul Ryan VP announcement:
