My previous pieces on Republicans who could shake up the primary if they declared as candidates covered Rick Perry and Sarah Palin; both are illustrative of a challenge that any presidential candidate faces in a crowded primary, which is the need to differentiate from everyone else.
The similarity between Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann is clear. Rick Perry shares traits with Mitt Romney (including looking like they were both sent by an unimaginative casting director). The Tea Party, the Christian right, corporate/establishment Republicans – candidates contort to fit the needs of as many as these subgroups of the party as possible, knowing that appealing to some will alienate others.
Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin does not neatly fit into a brand. He is the chairman of the House budget committee, a young, unabashed wonk, and author of the Path to Prosperity, the Republicans’ proposed budget for 2012, which calls for dramatic cuts to health care entitlements, the repeal of much of the Affordable Care Act, and tax cuts. He is the GOP’s intellectual standard-bearer in the legislature, and the driving force behind their policy agenda, including the privatisation of Medicare, which provides publicly funded healthcare to citizens over the age of 65 and is considered one of the sacred cows of American politics.
What Ryan says on conservative economic policy is gospel to the GOP, as Newt Gingrich found out to his cost when he criticised Ryan’s budget for its cuts to healthcare and came under such withering fire from his own party that he was forced to call Ryan and apologise. No other Republican commands that kind of fear. Ryan runs Bartertown.
Ryan’s appeal to primary voters is broad: lionising tax cuts, hating the ACA, and treating deficit reduction as a moral imperative, damn the consequences, are messages that appeal to the entire Republican spectrum. All GOP candidates will talk that talk, but he actually wrote the book. Mark Dedrick, a lobbyist and political strategist who has worked in and around national politics for 15 years, put it best when he described Ryan as ‘one of the few potential candidates who has appeal across the board…his conservative credentials are unquestioned, and he’s achieved them while being thought of as the intellectual, thinking-man’s Republican.’
Four years ago the Republican party was driven from the field in what seemed a massive rejection not just of the party but the principles by which it had governed for eight years; last year it won back the House largely through voter fear and anger, not a serious platform. The GOP has slipped dangerously close to being seen as a party without ideas, and Ryan has been stalwart in preventing that. This leadership has won him the support of conservative publication The Weekly Standard and its editor, Bill Kristol, giving him a bit more pull with the GOP establishment.
Most of Ryan’s ideas are red meat for the Republican base, but he can defend and promote them articulately enough to give some a patina of plausibility. He has also framed the deficit as a national security issue, arguing that, without the economic platform he proposes, America’s competitiveness will deteriorate and the country will become a second-tier power, thus elevating a financial policy dispute to something of national, nay, historic significance, with him in the role of voice of reason and saviour. Presidential runs have been made out of less.
Ryan, so far, has rather unconvincingly declared that he will not run – ‘I think I want to see how this field develops’ is not exactly an irrevocable refusal – and has been open about interest in the vice-presidential slot, a more traditional beginning for area-specialists who need to round out their resumes, including George HW Bush (foreign policy) and Al Gore (environment).
If he were to stand and win the nomination, Ryan would have rather serious electability problems. Republicans are still struggling to connect their obsession with the deficit with job creation, and polls indicate that substantially more Americans blame Congress, Wall Street, and George W Bush for the current economic plight than blame Obama. Unless that changes radically, it will take more than Ryan’s powers of articulation to unseat the incumbent. It is also likely that Ryan has gone too far with the proposed privatisation of Medicare, a genuine political third rail; ‘Medi-killer’ could very easily become 2012’s ‘death panel’, except grounded in truth and actually successful.
It is not clear that it would ever get that far. Ryan certainly has no equivalent in the current field, which creates an interesting dichotomy; he could pull from Romney’s establishment base with his financial acumen and draw from Bachmann with his vehement eloquence on tax-cuts, or he could appeal to both but win neither, with the establishment staying with last time’s silver medallist and Bachmann’s base sticking with her social ultra-conservatism. Until the GOP picks its candidate, however, Paul Ryan is the de facto leader of the Republican party; his colleagues and potential rivals discount him at their peril, and Democrats had better get used to him as a national figure.
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Frank Spring tweets @FrankSpring
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