Ryan Streeter
Follow Ryan on Twitter
There are people on the stage during each Republican debate whom we all know will never win the nomination, let alone the Presidency.
Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, and even Michele Bachmann are all honorable and dedicated American patriots. But they don’t stand a chance.
Meanwhile, people who should be on the stage have chosen not to be.
And they keep emerging in prominent public forums in ways that remind us how sad we are that they aren’t running.
In the past 48 hours, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, and Paul Ryan have all given speeches that show why they should be running – and perhaps why they aren’t.
They should be running because they are utterly committed to addressing America’s gravest of problems. They aren’t running because each of them doesn’t feel like being President is their highest calling – they’re just as happy doing other things to advance the cause that got them into politics in the first place.
Here are the speeches:
Chris Christie’s speech last night at the Reagan Ranch was Christie at his best – and will only inflame the “Run, Chris, Run” passions of many throughout the GOP. He had some memorable lines, such as calling Obama a “bystander in the Oval Office” – a phrase that will certainly be not only repeated but become a part of public discourse. But he also made the point that our exceptionalism begins at home:
Americans do not have the luxury of thinking that what we have long viewed as purely domestic matters have no consequences beyond our borders. To the contrary. What we say and what we do here at home affects how others see us and in turn affects what it is they say and do.
Mitch Daniels made a similar point at his speech at AEI on Monday. Watch it here. Daniels made the case for why we need mathematical sobriety in our public debate about what will be an inevitable economic collapse unless that sobriety overtakes us.
Meanwhile, over in the Bay Area on the west coast, Paul Ryan gave a talk at the Hoover Institution on how we can fix our broken health care system by reforming the health care marketplace into a consumer-centric, market-driven arena. It’s a classic Paul Ryan speech filled with his trademark “wonkiness,” but also rooted in right reason and commonsense. Upon reading it, it’s hard to argue that there is a better solution to our health care problem than what Ryan lays out.
If it’s not frustrating enough that none of these three reformers is running in 2012, watch Jeb Bush on Morning Joe yesterday to get a sense of how a reformer thinks (in this case, about education).
All of the foregoing reformers should be running for President. But they’re not. And the reasons each gives for why they aren’t running makes us want them to run all the more. Listening to them talk makes swallowing those reasons all the more difficult.
Not only is it sad that none of Daniels/Ryan/Christie is running - it's also simple, to wit: If none of them changes his mind (and who among us believes that one, or more, will?) it is HIGHLY likely we will be saddled with four more years of BHO.
Kurt Waltz
Scottsdale, AZ
Posted by: Kurt E. Waltz | September 28, 2011 at 08:03 PM