OPINION:
Paul Ryan looks like a lock for a job he says he never wanted. We believe him. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee says he values time with his family, his guns and the tax code. That sounds like the usual cliche of the pol departing Washington, but we believe him on this, too. He says he drafted his acceptance while sitting in a tree in a deer stand in Wisconsin. A man doesn’t think up fibs and stretchers in a deer stand. We believe him.
Mr. Ryan is a wonk, a disciple of Jack Kemp for whom he once worked, and a man more comfortable with data and policy formulation than the backslapping, fundraising and deal-cutting that takes most of a speaker’s time. The Ways and Means Committee is the perfect perch for a man dedicated to the economics and politics of pro-growth tax reform.
However, he got a taste of politics at the top as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, finally seeing America first, supping on the fly on bad food and learning to sleep sitting up in an airplane, to leave San Diego after dinner and look forward to a cold breakfast in Bangor, Maine. He was like the man in Abraham Lincoln’s story about to be ridden out of town on a rail: “If it weren’t for the honor of it, I’d just as soon walk.” He nevertheless put everything he had in it, and he got an inkling of what it could be like promoting his own ideas. He agreed to have his other arm twisted this time.
That arm has been subjected to pressure by every prominent Republican in the country, but it is not the job for a man eager to advance tax reform or ambitions to find a steppingstone to the White House. The job of speaker is far more likely to chew up Mr. Ryan than to propel him to bigger and better things.
Mr. Ryan is a smart fellow and thus his reluctance to jump at the chance to be the speaker. Even if the various factions within the Republican caucus agree to rally behind him, he knows it won’t last. Politicians don’t come to Washington to play a bit part in the opera. He says he won’t sacrifice time with his family to raise funds for his colleagues, and wants to spend as much time as he always has pursuing deer, pheasant and other game. Good luck with that. If he harbors a deep desire to be president — and who in Washington is not waiting under a tree in the hopes that lightning will strike — he knows that Henry Clay didn’t make it. Newt Gingrich didn’t, either, and it wasn’t for lack of trying by either man.
Why then is he even thinking about the job that nearly everyone is pleading for him to take? It’s not, as some in the fever swamps of the right are saying, that he’s a secret liberal in a cabal to hijack the Grand Old Party, or to drop the pretense of national borders and open the flood gates to the millions. Some want him to take the job because there’s no suitable alternative. Others are persuaded that Mr. Ryan is a conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. He is, in fact, a happy warrior in the mold of both of those worthies, ready to treat voters like adults, and knows what the nation needs to talk about to recover and prosper. The American dream is morphing into a nightmare, and he might be the man to wake up the sleeping body politic.
The gentleman from Janesville is both a patriot and a Boy Scout and his Republican colleagues who will choose a speaker should not ask for more. But Boy Scout or not, he better not expect a merit badge.
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