Paul Ryan at his best is amazing, and that makes Paul Ryan at his worst that much more disappointing. Ryan has played an enormous and positive role in the construction of a truly post-Reagan policy agenda. On controversial and key issues, Ryan has shown both courage and the willingness to do his homework. Very few Republican office holders have demonstrated those qualities simultaneously. That makes it all the more frustrating when Ryan lapses into the clichés and deceptions of the GOP lobbying and consulting classes.

When it comes to shifting the policy agenda, Ryan’s accomplishments have been enormous. Ryan was able to make premium support Medicare reform not only the agenda of the national Republican party, but also as a component of center-right political identity. When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Ryan’s Medicare proposal “right-wing social engineering,” it was Gingrich who was called out as the phony conservative — even though Gingrich had a decades-long reputation as a bomb-throwing conservative ideologue. Gingrich’s suggestion of primarily focusing on cutting Medicare fraud was vapid, but it would have gone over just fine prior to Ryan. Ryan was able to change the Republican and conservative position on Medicare in a positive way.

What was more improbable, was how Ryan changed the national politics of Medicare outside the institutions of the Right. Richard Brookhiser had written about “rightworld” — the world of conservative activists, broadcasters, politicians, writers, and wonks. Sometimes ideas become popular entirely within rightworld for a little while and then fade into obscurity without having had any more impact on the rest of America than last year’s fashions in Outer Mongolia. That ultimate obscurity was the fate of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, Mike Huckabee’s FairTax, and Rick Perry’s kinda-sorta-flat tax.

But Ryan got his party to embrace a large and fairly complicated reform of a popular old-age entitlement and this reform was not the reason why his party lost. The result is that premium support Medicare reform is more than a fad, and will very likely be high on the GOP agenda the next time Republicans wield national power. The story of Ryan and Medicare reform is a testament to how courage, intelligence, creativity, and hard work can change national politics.

It is Ryan’s ability to look beyond the short time horizons of the GOP consulting class that makes Ryan so problematic on immigration policy. It isn’t so much that Ryan agrees with the GOP lobbyist and consultant classes on the desirability of Gang of Eight-style immigration reform. Fine, let us have that discussion. The problem is in how Ryan characterizes the discussion.

Ryan talks about how “there is much less daylight between Republicans on this issue than people would like to acknowledge.”

No, sorry, there is much more daylight than Paul Ryan and the Republican lobbyist and consulting classes would like to acknowledge. There is a lot of daylight on the issue of whether future immigration should be structured to favor skills and English proficiency or whether future immigration should be concentrated in the low-skill sector. It just so happens that all this daylight is between the American public and the Washington-based political elites of both parties. There is a lot of daylight between those who believe that workplace verification and a visa tracking system should precede legalization, and those who think that legalization should come first, while internal enforcement should come never at some unspecified date in the future as the Democratic party and the business lobbies do everything they can to make sure that internal enforcement never gets off the ground.

It is Ryan’s attempt to mislead the public over the issues at stake in the immigration debate that makes him so much like the GOP consulting class — on this issue. There is the same evasion about the size and composition about future immigration flows. There is the same inanity about controlling the border (at least until legalization and guest worker programs are implemented) as a way to avoid talking about how internal enforcement has been put off.

It is great that Ryan sometimes break with the GOP consulting class. It isn’t even all that problematic that Ryan occasionally shares the policy preferences the GOP consultants and lobbyists. The GOP consultants won’t be wrong about everything. But sharing the policy preferences of the GOP consultants does not have to mean sharing their vices.