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When President Obama appeared at the House GOP retreat a couple weeks ago, he singled out Ryan as a Republican with serious ideas, even if he disagrees with many of them.

Ryan asked the president if he could support a proposal he's worked on with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., for a line item veto.

Their proposal would be constitutional, Ryan said, keeping the “power of the purse” with Congress but giving the president the tool to pull out pork from legislation.

“It’s not going to solve our entire fiscal problem, but it kind of goes at the culture of spending, and it embarrasses a lot of the pork out of the budget,” Ryan said. “If (Nebraska Democratic Sen.) Ben Nelson knew that the "Cornhusker Kickback' that he got for his state and only his state might have to be voted on independently later by his peers, he might not ask for it in the first place. And, so that’s kind of the chilling effect on a lot of the waste and a lot of the deal cutting that’s going on around here that we think our deal will achieve.”

He argues that Republicans need to stand firm on their principles, but he admits that former President George W. Bush and Republicans were fiscally irresponsible when I pressed him on that.

“I’m not going to argue with that,” he said. “The problem our party had was we were soft on spending. … A lot of us fought this stuff in the majority at the time but we were in the minority (in the majority) and the minority lost those fights.

"We need to acknowledge to the American people we did things wrong," he continued, "especially when it came to spending, and we’ve got to learn from those mistakes and make sure that we don’t repeat them. I think we owe it to voters to acknowledge this and if you don’t acknowledge the mistakes were made, then they don’t think you learned your lesson.”

Ryan, considered a rising star of the party, says the Republican leadership needs to have an “adult conversation” about the economic situation of the country.

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