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What Paul Ryan is up to with shadow campaign
This is exactly right.


http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-ryan-president-2016-4

Here's what Paul Ryan is really up to with his shadow campaign

[image: Paul Ryan.]AP Photo/J. Scott ApplewhitePaul Ryan.

It was fun to pretend that Paul Ryan was running a stealth campaign for the
Republican nomination for president, modeled on the highly successful
stealth campaign he ran for House speaker.

But I believe him when he says that he really, really, *really*
<http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-ryan-president-running-out-2016-4>
won't seek or accept the nomination.

I believe his campaign-esque speech
<http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-ryan-speech-donald-trump-mistake-makers-takers-2016-3>
laying out a vision of a less acrimonious Republican politics — and the
slick campaign-ad-like video
<http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-04-08/is-this-a-paul-ryan-for-president-ad>
made from that speech, and his general positioning of himself as the
antidote to Trumpism in the Republican Party — were never about trying to
become the nominee at a contested convention.

I believe all of this because there's another, simpler explanation for Paul
Ryan's shadow campaign. All this positioning has never been about 2016.
It's about 2017.

Take a moment and imagine that this garbage fire of an election is over.
It's January 2017, President Hillary Clinton is being inaugurated, and
House Speaker Paul Ryan has become by far the most powerful figure in the
Republican Party simply by continuing to sit where he is while all his
rivals set themselves on fire.

By early next year, Ryan could be the only prominent establishment
Republican whose reputation has not been destroyed through loss to Trump,
supplication to Trump, defeat in a Senate race because Donald Trump is
losing a landslide at the top of the ticket, or some other similarly
horrible fate.

Alternatively, if Ted Cruz manages to grab the Republican nomination, Ryan
would start 2017 in an even stronger position. Cruz would also lose badly
to Clinton, the other non-Trump candidates for the nomination would still
be humiliated, Senate Republicans would be pointing fingers at each other
about who lost the majority, and Ryan wouldn't need to compete with Cruz
for the role of Republican standard-bearer after the election.

With the leadership of an entire political party about to fall into his lap
through the self-destruction of everyone around him, Ryan realizes that he
needs to start now on articulating a vision of what Republicans should do
next, lest somebody else do it for him. We've all seen what's happened
since 2012, when Mitt Romney shocked Republicans by losing and nobody
stepped into the vacuum with compelling instructions for the party about
what to do next.

It's good that Ryan is being proactive. Unfortunately, the vision he is
laying out is not terribly interesting.

What are the apparent planks of Ryan's vision for the party? One is that
Republicans shouldn't use Trump-style appeals to white-identity politics. A
second is that Republicans should talk more nicely about poor people while
cutting their benefits. A third is that Republicans should maintain their
orthodoxy on free trade, free markets, and the need for cuts to Social
Security and Medicare.

You might recognize these principles as substantially identical to those
espoused by Marco Rubio — and one key lesson from this campaign is that
Republican voters have very little interest in Rubioism.

Ryan understands that he is about to be thrust into leadership of the
Republican Party without ever seeking *or receiving* its presidential
nomination. But he does not yet get that the party's substantive policy
agenda must change if its candidates hope to win a majority of voters
without the appeals to protectionism, nationalism, and racism that are so
compelling for Trump voters.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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