Politico: Obama, Paul Ryan ‘Covert Collaborators’

From Edward-Isaac Dovere writing at Politico:

President Barack Obama and House Speaker Paul Ryan haven’t had a face-to-face meeting in more than two-and-a-half years. And despite Ryan’s election this week and Obama’s congratulatory call to him in advance of the vote, there still isn’t one scheduled.

But the two already have a good sense of each other — and beside John Boehner, Ryan’s probably the House Republican Obama’s spent the most time with. And if Obama had to pick a House Republican to be speaker, people who know the president say he’d probably have voted for Ryan himself. There isn’t a close runner-up.

Looking ahead to what the dynamic between them will be now, aides to the president and new speaker point to their collaboration on getting trade fast-track through Congress last summer as a model.

People in both offices note that the two leaders helped produce a bill with bipartisan support and tea-party opposition that the president eagerly signed. They’re a lot less eager to talk about what happened behind-the-scenes to get there: significant collaboration between the president’s staff in the West Wing and Ryan’s staff on the Ways and Means Committee, along with several direct phone calls the White House still won’t confirm between Obama and Ryan. Those calls were in part vote counting, in part strategizing about how to avoid looking like they were working together — even though they were.

Read the rest of the story at Politico.