Draft Paul Ryan: With Daniels out, the idea sounds more appealing all the time

Ryan Streeter
Follow Ryan on Twitter

Now that Mitch Daniels is out, Paul Ryan should reconsider running for President. He shares with Daniels a kind of purity of purpose that other candidates don't have but which voters want. Ryan repeated on Meet the Press yesterday what he has said before - that he's not planning on running - but his statements are a long way from an official renunciation of presidential ambition. He might change his mind if enough people got behind an effort to draft him. 

Here are five reasons why a "Draft Ryan" effort makes sense:

Ryan was harping on our nation’s fiscal crisis before it was cool. While GOP House members are quick to state their support of Ryan’s ideas, remember that only a handful of them co-sponsored his early Roadmap bill. If he were to get in the race, it would be because he is passionate about the issues, not because he wanted to be President – a Mitch Daniels kind of virtue that voters are prepared to reward these days. Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty were quick to praise Daniels on Sunday, saying that his warnings about our “out-of-control national debt” will “not go unheard.” But no one thinks of them as people who were serious about entitlement reform as the main way to address the debt before it became more  acceptable to talk about it. Ryan, on the other hand, was defining (and possibly jeopardizing) his political career by these issues before the nation woke up to them. His interests are aligned with the nation's needs in an authentic way, not as a result of political ambition.

He’s young. This doesn’t get enough play in the media. Ryan is youthful and energetic. He’s more wonkish than Obama, but he’s a candidate that younger voters can get behind. And the GOP needs to start turning out more young voters.

He knows how to appeal to voters of all stripes and could do well in a general election. Ryan’s home district in Wisconsin is pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. He knows how to relate to people non-ideologically and keep the discussion about the issues. While talk radio and cable TV hosts may prefer combativeness and ideological purity, such characteristics will not win a general election. Daniels was the best prospective candidate in this regard. Ryan is a close second.

He knows how to do well in a primary. The previous point doesn't mean Ryan is incapable of succeeding in a primary. The guy was a staffer of Sam Brownback’s and worked for Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp. He knows social cons and understands what enthuses conservative voters. He has become the face of the Republican party in the past few months and is admired for standing firm on conservative values (note how Gingrich's attack last week turned conservatives against the former Speaker, not Ryan). He would handle a primary as well as anyone.

He would keep the Republican primary honest. One reason Daniels' prospective candidacy was such a forceful notion was that other candidates would have been forced to deal directly and consistently with the issues surrounding our fiscal crisis. Daniels would have kept those issues front and center. Ryan would do the same. He would also force specificity on issues, which we need right now. Holding to general talking points in the hopes that specificity can wait until after the election won't fly this time around. Ryan would force debate on specific solutions to Medicare, for instance, that would help differentiate not only Republicans from Obama, but Republicans from each other.

Ryan doesn't have the executive experience that Daniels has, and we all know that a member of Congress isn't supposed to run for President. However, the President of the United States didn't have executive experience before January 2009, and he was elected before completing a single term in the Senate. Conventional wisdom is meant to be broken in 2012.

Also, Mitt Romney is a good gauge for the value of executive experience right now. While voters respect his business career, it won't likely be enough to overcome a policy error - RomneyCare. Policy and political courage will matter a lot in this next election. Ryan is well-suited for just such a race.

Mary Matalin sums up the rationale for Ryan well in this Politico article:

The attraction to Ryan is he is the total package: brains, guts, political skills, perseverance, perspective, humility and most important, convictions predicated on conservatism. He is neither defensive nor self-righteous on the articulation of time-tested, commonsense Burke-ian, free-market, limited, enumerated representative republicanism. His weakness is not all in his party have his strengths.

Comments

[Ricardo's Ghost]

The GOP know they do not want to get tagged as the party who wants to rip up Medicare, and many Republican leaders are already distancing themselves from Ryan's plan. Nominating him for President would undo all of that, sink Republican chances in House and Senate races, and fail to win the White House.

The other danger is that the Biden talks produce a compromise on the budget, and then the entire purpose of a Ryan candidacy is lost.

And on top of all that running for President means he'll have to exit the House, so if you're a Paul Ryan fan, asking him to run for President is in effect asking him to exit national politics. Not wise.

[Veteran]

Why is ConHome supporting the Republican party? They are no Tories and in the main are completely bonkers.

[CHUSA]

Veteran - you may be looking for ConHome UK. This is the ConHome USA site where we cover the GOP.

[Ricardo's Ghost]

ConHome isn't a Tory site, it's a conservative one.

Us Brits may find American politics bizarre from the outside but:
- British politics looks pretty bizarre from the outside too (with PMQs, the House of Lords, and MPs like Dennis Skinner, Anthony Beaumont-Dark, Boris Johnson etc.)
- Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann may lack gravitas, but we had John Prescott as our Deputy Prime Minister for a decade
- the GOP actually covers a wide field: with right-on social conservatives like Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback on the hand, through to more moderate characters like Jon Huntsman and Olympia Snowe.

[HYUFD]

Ryan's Out too.

PAUL RYAN: “I’m not running for president, I’m not planning on running for president … My plan is to be a good chairman of the House Budget Committee and fight for the fiscal sanity of this nation.”

[CHUSA]

HYUFD - just to be clear: Daniels, Thune, Pence, Huckabee, Barbour have all issued official statements. Ryan has not, neither has Christie. Denying you're running on a news show is an old political practice that is often contradicted later. This is part of the reason we'll keep Christie and Ryan in our tracking poll, and also why I can see supporting a draft effort for either of them at this point.

[Mark in Coventry]

Ricardo's Ghost: Sir Anthony Beaumont-Dark ceased to be an MP in 1992 and passed away in 2006, not sure he was the best example to give.