Chicago - Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan said on Monday he has "no regrets" over the 2012 campaign despite losing the election last week.
In his first public comments since Mitt Romney was defeated by President Barack Obama after a multi-billion-dollar campaign, Ryan admitted the Democratic incumbent "did a better job of getting voters to the polls".
"It hurts to lose a big election like this, but I don't have any regrets whatsoever," Ryan told the Racine Journal Times on Monday as part of a series of interviews with local media outlets in his native Wisconsin.
"We ran the kind of race we wanted to run," campaigning on "specific solutions and big ideas", he said.
"It's bittersweet. The sweet part is I'm back home on the block I grew up on, with my friends and family," he said. "The bitter part is we lost a major presidential election at a critical time."
Ryan is expected to remain head of the powerful House budget committee, where he became a rising star among Republicans by advocating wide-ranging tax and spending cuts and the reform of government entitlement programmes.
Obama won the popular vote and defeated Romney in the all-important Electoral College by 332 to 206 votes, winning nearly every battleground state and defying the dark omens of a sluggish economy and high unemployment.
Ryan has been spoken of as a likely presidential candidate in 2016, and will be heavily involved in talks over how to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff", a set of potentially devastating spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect in January if US lawmakers cannot agree on a plan to cut the deficit.
- AFP