Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) appeared on Meet the Press this weekend to discuss his new proposals for entitlement reform. Host David Gregory accused the congressman of showing a lack of sympathy for those in need.

“It doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of sympathy for people who need the government’s help,” Gregory claimed. “What you seem to be saying is that people have a problem with their own dependency here, that the government is only furthering.”

For his part, Ryan did a pretty effective job of pushing back on the tired narrative that evil, greedy Republicans who are looking to reform entitlements are mean-spirited and want to hurt poor people.

Ryan: That’s not my intent, far from it. My point is we don’t want to have a poverty management system that simply perpetuates poverty. We want to get at the root causes of poverty to get people out of poverty.

That’s what we’re proposing here, have benefits customized to a unique person’s problems, because poverty is very complicated, to not just keep them where they are but help them get where they want to be. That is the thrust of these proposals.

The federal government’s approach has ended up maintaining poverty, managing poverty. In many ways it has disincentivized people going to work. …So we need to reemphasize getting people up in their lives, giving them the tools to do that. That’s the point.

As IJ Review's Michael Hausam noted, this kind of pushback is something that any Republican who is serious about reforming the entitlement system needs to employ if they are to avoid similar accusations from Democrats, and repeated by members of the media, like Gregory:

The huge obstacle that conservatives have to overcome is that pointing out the problems of creating yet another government program and handing out benefits doesn’t mean there’s a lack of sympathy or care. Making a case for an alternative, one that isn’t merely symbolic, is very difficult to do...

The GOP has a very difficult road trying to counter the left’s domination of social programs; not only do they need to undo the morass of existing programs, they need to also establish a narrative that counters the you-don’t-really-care criticism that Gregory – and most Democrats – will continue to bring up.