Paul Ryan for President and Other Nonsense

It’s surfacing on the Charlie Sykes Show, and promoted in The Weekly Standard, the publication where Bill Kristol promoted Sarah Palin so hard that John McCain fell into the whackjob trap (Kristol has already published love poetry to Paul Ryan and others).  The notion is in its infancy, but it should be rocking Wisconsin politics.   Paul Ryan for President!  Even  the whackjob darling of the moment (soon to be supplanted by Rick Perry), Scott Walker, is promoting a POTUS run by Paul Ryan, though it remains to be seen if Walker is merely trying to misdirect the attention of Wisconsin voters away from himself.  My own view partially agrees with a metaphor supposedly used by a “Ryan confidante,” that choosing to run would be like taking a swan dive over a cliff, though I’m not sure at all why that Ryan confidante thought that a good thing.  Whatever. 

I suppose Rob Zerban thinks the notion of whether Ryan will run is an important question, but I’m thinking the important question concerns whether Ryan could win the GOP nomination.  And I’m pleased to say I think he could win, and that he’s perhaps the only one of the whackjob wing of the GOP who could best Mitt Romney of the flipflop wing of the GOP. 

As our own Jeff Simpson notes, the religious whackjob wing of the GOP has become indistinguishable from the Tea Party wing of the GOP, according to a recent article in the New York Times.  I don’t find that surprising at all, but wonder whether Paul Ryan, a noted proponent of the Godless philosophy of Ayn Rand can attract the religious voters of the Tea Party.  I suppose that gives the Tea Partiers too much credit for smarts, but it will still be difficult for Paul Ryan to wrest away primary voters from the likes of Michelle Bachman, the Tea Party favorite who just won the Iowa Straw Poll, and Rick Perry, who was Tea Party before there was a Tea Party.  (Rick Perry has his own problems in the race.)  Could Ryan get even a third of the Tea Party votes, even if they do identify strongly with his slash and burn economic policies?  Plase don’t mistake that the Tea Party is important for any GOP Presidential Primary candidate — even flipflopper Mitt Romney is courting the Tea Party vote.  The question in my mind concerns whether a Paul Ryan candidacy could capture some of the Republicans who back Romney, and that is very uncertain. 

Can Paul Ryan come off as the centrist Mitt Romney portrays himself to be, at least when he isn’t courting the whackjobs?  That would take finesse, and I’m unsure Paul Ryan has any finesse whatsoever.  Ryan’s budget proposals, with class warfare as their central component, show clearly he has no intention of ever entertaining “finesse” as a value.  To that end, I don’t think Paul Ryan’s potential candidacy has a prayer, but his lack of finesse just may cause him to enter the race, and that should make more Wisconsinites than just Rob Zerban happy.  Paul Ryan is likely to say all sorts of whackdoodle crap while on the campaign trail, and that will play right into Zerban’s hands, I’m thinking.  Most important for us, a Paul Ryan candidacy will make the already full Republican clown car of candidates seem even more ludicrous, and would mean we’ll have an even more entertaining election cycle.