If you flip through the pages of the Republican National Committee's 2012 election post-mortem, you'll find plenty of familiar homilies to the importance of good messaging, and very few about the importance of policy to the building of a national political coalition.

But outside its pages, Republicans actually gained one important insight: that the party's obsessive genuflecting to job creators is alienating to the vast majority of voters. A week after the election, in the pages of National Review, conservative writer and party reformer Ramesh Ponnuru explained, "The Republican story about how societies prosper—not just the Romney story—dwelt on the heroic entrepreneur stifled by taxes and regulations: an important story with which most people do not identify. The ordinary person does not see himself as a great innovator."

Speaking over a year later at no less a temple to capitalism than the American Enterprise Institute, the GOP Senate leader himself borrowed Ponnuru's observation. Republicans, Mitch McConnell lamented, "have often lost sight of the fact that our average voter is not John Galt."

Outside the precincts of elite conservatism, this sounded like a penetrating glimpse into the obvious. But it was actually a pretty big breakthrough. Particularly considering that the party's 2012 campaign was in essence a giant totem to the entrepreneur—whose successes are borne of pure grit and whose shortcomings are at least partially rooted in the rapaciousness of those who rely on public services, and the party that makes job creators pay for them.

What made it promising is that the GOP's job-creator fetish is more than just a talking point. It is both progenitor and progeny of the party's policy agenda. If it's a problem, then the agenda has a problem as well. And so do its guardians. Intentionally or unintentionally, this sentiment posed a challenge to them. Now Paul Ryan, who authored the agenda, has answered the challenge—not by fashioning a less plutocratic agenda, but by shoehorning the old one into a different rhetorical frame.