Here’s a sentence I never thought I would ever write: I guess we should take Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan at his word when he says he will not accept the Republican presidential nomination this year.
I don’t remember ever before suggesting that anyone believe anything Ryan has ever said. It’s always amazed me that so many national journalists appear to believe much of what Ryan says when it has so very often turned out to be glaringly untrue.
And, of course, when any politician denies he or she is running for president, it’s almost a sure sign they absolutely are.
Ryan also had been going out of his way lately to keep his name in the conversation as Republican leaders have become so appalled by the sorry choices remaining out of their teeming mob of failed candidates, they’re actually hoping for a deadlocked convention so that they can start all over.
Ryan got attention in his usual double-talking way by regularly issuing pious pronouncements distancing himself from the uglier positions of billionaire blowhard Donald Trump and extremist Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, his party’s presidential frontrunners, while still promising to support either of them if they won the nomination.
He seemed to be positioning himself to play the party’s savior to prevent two terrible Republican candidates from leading the party to massive defeat in November.
And much the same way Ryan won his current position as speaker of the House, Ryan also enjoys having Republicans beg him to take the powerful jobs he lusts after.
But now Ryan has finally made what’s known as “a Shermanesque statement,” named after Union Gen. William Sherman, who in the 1880s killed a Republican attempt to draft him as a presidential candidate by flatly declaring he would not run if nominated and would not serve if elected.
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Ryan came closer than any modern politician to saying just that when he announced at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee: “I do not want nor will I accept the nomination for our party.”
“Count me out,” Ryan said. “If you want to be the nominee for our party—to be the president—you should actually run for it. I chose not to do this. Therefore, I should not be considered. Period. End of story.”
Waiting for a Better Opportunity
Since no one who has watched Ryan’s political rise and his careful nurturing of the media actually believes Ryan has ended his ambition to become president of the United States, his emphatic statement marks the end of an entirely different story.
Ryan appears to realize the Republican run-up to November’s election has turned into such an unmitigated disaster that the political future of anyone remotely associated with the ticket could be destroyed once and for all. And that the party’s stuck with the candidates it has.
It’s bad enough that as House speaker, Ryan will preside as convention chairman over what could be a nationally televised nightmare for Republicans as Trump and Cruz, who openly traffic in racial, ethnic and religious bigotry, try to outdo each other in appealing to some of the forces of hatred within the party.
Ryan himself bears some responsibility for attracting the mean-spirited voters who support the outrageous proposals of Trump or Cruz for building an enormous Mexican wall, deporting millions of Latinos, banning Muslim immigration and calling for constant police surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods.
Ryan repeatedly crafted extreme House budgets that shred social safety net programs based on racial stereotypes of black and brown people lolling around on hammocks enjoying all the free government benefits of poverty.
Somehow Ryan’s favorable media image as a thoughtful, reasonable conservative even survived his plan to slash Social Security and Medicare, which was graphically dramatized in a memorable political commercial featuring a Ryan lookalike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair over a cliff.
Ryan always explains his proposals to dismantle such vital government programs as attempts to save those programs, like the Vietnam general who claimed he had to destroy villages to save them from the communists.
But Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman notes Ryan doesn’t even use the savings from gutting those programs to pay off the enormous government deficits he’s always warning about. Instead, Ryan uses the money to give the wealthy huge tax cuts.
Ryan and other Republican leaders now are seeing some of the disastrous consequences of attempting to subtly appeal to racism and fear of other cultures to win elections. Trump and Cruz have found brazenness works even better.
So Ryan has decided to lie low with his presidential ambitions for a few years in the hope of preserving the possibility of a future run under less poisonous conditions.
That presumes, of course, that a Republican nomination for president will be able to recover some political respectability once again sometime in Ryan’s lifetime after all the destruction from the party’s current candidates.
