Paul Ryan’s decision to retire on Wednesday unleashed a wave of hot takes, liberal snark, and conservative think pieces about how the Republican Party has lamentably drifted from Ryan’s party of ideas to the party of Donald Trump. That Ryan’s retirement would spark so much commentary is not a surprise. He is the Speaker of the House, after all. But there’s something else about the Ryan news, undoubtedly the subject of much gossip last night over beers at the Hawk ‘n’ Dove, and it has nothing to do with the office he holds. It’s more about the Cult of Paul Ryan—a fixation that exists in Washington and pretty much nowhere else.

Ryan is fundamentally a creation of Washington, an insider beloved only by insiders, a politician who could only succeed by charming his way through the corridors of conservative think tanks and off-the-record meetings with reporters. Ryan does P90X and drinks Miller Lite, giving him a patina of youthful coolness in a town that lacks any such thing. And with the help of an aggressive P.R. team, he is skilled at charming the press with frequent interviews and knowing off-the-record asides. In those chats, Ryan projects a politics-is-broken centrism that’s fetishized by Beltway pundits. It works every time. The conservative writer Ben Domenech argued Wednesday that “it’s easy to forget how Paul Ryan was vilified by the media” during the Obama era. I’d argue precisely the opposite: Ryan was and continues to be adored by the Washington media. It’s the only plausible reason that something like the “Young Guns”—his corny 2010 campaign to rebrand House Republican leadership alongside fellow starched-shirt white guys Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy—wasn’t met with a chorus of ruthless mockery.

Whatever the press wants to think of him, Ryan is a devoted supply-sider through and through, a partisan warrior whose devotion to spending cuts and tax reform has endeared him to every Weekly Standard subscriber from K Street to Fairfax County. And unlike a lot of the slow zebras in Congress, Ryan actually reads bills and budgets, allowing him to answer easily and without follow-up when reporters ask him about the very same documents they only skimmed. The bar for day-to-day success on Capitol Hill is actually quite low, but Ryan has pole-vaulted over it time and time again, making him a star in a city of duds. Ryan won acclaim for passing tax reform, for instance, but with Republican majorities in both chambers and a friendly White House, it’s hard to imagine how tax reform wouldn’t have passed under Speaker Devin Nunes or Speaker Raúl Labrador. What about a fix for DACA, a mighty legislative challenge that Ryan professes to support? Nothing has been done.

Whenever Ryan has been asked about his political ambitions over the years, he’s shrugged off questions with his patented aw-shucks routine. “I’m a policy guy,” is a favorite retort. And it’s partly true. Despite what you read about Ryan’s star power, there are 40 governors you’ve never heard of with more charisma and public-facing political skills. It’s hard to imagine Ryan winning a statewide race and becoming a governor or a senator, let alone president of the United States, a delectable prospect for some Club for Growth fanboys but no actual voter in Iowa. It hasn’t been polled since last year, but Ryan’s favorability rating is actually lower than Trump’s. Ryan’s favorability among swamp dwellers, I suspect, would be much higher.

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The distance between Washington’s regard for Ryan and the country’s opinion of him was put to a real test in 2012, when Republican nominee Mitt Romney tapped Ryan as his running mate. I never covered Congress full time. I’ve logged many hours getting lost in the Rayburn House Office Building, staking out the Capitol Hill Club and eating the shitty guacamole at Tortilla Coast. But I’ve always been a campaign reporter. So when Romney enlisted Ryan, the boy king of Capitol Hill, I was intrigued to finally see him in action, shirtsleeves rolled up and out there in the world, charming voters in the same way he managed to charm the Wall Street Journal editorial page for so many years.