“They want to care,” Bartlett said of Ryan and modern Republicans. “But they’re so imprisoned by their ideology that they can’t offer anything meaningful.” Ryan has explained the difference by noting that the national debt has grown enormously since Kemp ran for president in 1988, nearly doubling as a percentage of the economy.

GOP targets perceptions

Ryan’s interest in poverty dovetails with a larger effort to revamp the GOP, which has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus commissioned an autopsy of the 2012 campaign that identified “the perception that the GOP does not care about people” as “a major deficiency,” and recommended a renewed effort to “be the champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder.”

Since then, the search has been on for a conservative response to rising income inequality and the record 15 percent of Americans who live in poverty.

At the Capitol last week, the conservative Heritage Foundation held a day-long anti-poverty forum to examine the historic rise in food-stamp dependency since the recession and methods of prison rehabilitation. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who led the push to defund Obama’s new health-insurance initiative, gave the keynote address, arguing for a revival of “civil society,” volunteerism and charity.

“The focus on limiting government spending will continue to be important, but it’s not enough,” Lee said afterward. With Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, “it’s easy for us to get stuck in the ‘no’ position. But the fact is we have to have a policy agenda.”

That shift may be particularly critical for Ryan, 43. He rose to prominence as the author of an austere budget blueprint that calls for privatizing Medicare and sharply slowing federal spending on the poor.

Then he joined the GOP ticket with Mitt Romney, who was cast by Democrats as an out-of-touch plutocrat. Romney’s characterization of lower-income Americans — the “47 percent” — as “victims,” “dependent upon government” and unwilling to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” was particularly devastating.

Priebus, a fellow Wisconsinite who has known Ryan since their College Republican days, said that image will not stick to the affable, down-to-earth Ryan.

“Paul’s his own person. He can be at the Kenosha County fair drinking Miller Lite in shorts and a T-shirt,” Priebus said. Fighting dependence and improving opportunity “were always things that were on his agenda.”

“I think he was embarrassed,” Woodson, the civil rights activist, said of Ryan. “And it propelled him to deepen his own understanding of this.”

Kemp’s influence

Unlike Romney, Ryan is no child of privilege. His dad died when he was 16, and he paid for college with a mix of Social Security survivors checks and maxed-out student loans, according to his brother, Tobin Ryan. During a semester in Washington, he went to work on Capitol Hill and found his way to Empower America, working directly for Kemp.

In the mid-1990s, crime and poverty were hot national issues. Kemp was a font of innovative ideas for reviving inner-city commerce, rebuilding public housing and overhauling the welfare system. He was pro-immigration, pro-equal opportunity and, above all, pro-tax cuts, which he viewed as government’s primary tool for promoting growth.

Unlike other Republicans, Kemp also frequently visited black and Hispanic voters and asked them directly for their votes.

Two days after Ryan was introduced as Romney’s running mate, he pushed to do the same. Advisers recall Ryan in workout clothes in a Des Moines Marriott, telling campaign officials in Boston that he had two requests: First, to meet the staff in person. And second, to travel to urban areas and speak about poverty.

No one said no. But with Romney focused relentlessly on Obama’s failure to improve the economy for middle-class Americans, the idea always seemed off-message. “We struggled to find the right timing to dovetail it into our messaging schedule,” Romney strategist Ed Gillespie said via e-mail.

Ryan adviser Dan Senor said Ryan argued that “47 million people on food stamps is an economic failure.” But Ryan did not get clearance to deliver a speech on poverty, his sole policy address, until two weeks before the election.

Ryan had “frustration during the campaign for obvious reasons. His message, which was more than jobs and business, was secondary, subsidiary. So you didn’t get the full Ryan,” said Bennett, who vacationed with Ryan and his family in Colorado this summer. When the campaign was over, Ryan found himself “wanting to say more about who he was and introducing that broader agenda.”

Ryan had sought Woodson’s help with his poverty speech. The two reconnected after the election and began traveling together in February — once a month, no reporters — to inner-city programs supported by Woodson’s Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. In Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Denver, Woodson said, Ryan asked questions about “the agents of transformation and how this differs from the professional approach” of government social workers.