Paul Ryan Is Still Running for President
BY RYAN LIZZA
The key to a successful draft campaign is to maintain an aura of deep reluctance.
In 1952, when Democrats met in Chicago to pick their Presidential nominee, they were torn into warring factions. Four years earlier, in Philadelphia, the Party had split over civil rights, and segregationists, led by Strom Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina, walked out of the Convention hall and founded the States’ Rights Democratic Party. President Harry Truman narrowly prevailed in a three-way contest, but four years later he declined to run for reëlection.
Finding a candidate acceptable to both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives was nearly impossible. Senator Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee, did well in the primaries, even outside the South, but urban Party bosses hated him because he exposed the Democrats’ links to organized crime. Truman thought there was one person who could unite the Party: Adlai Stevenson, an up-and-coming Midwesterner with an intellectual bent who was serving his first term as governor of Illinois. But when Truman tried to recruit Stevenson to run, early in the primary campaign, the governor turned him down and publicly denied any interest in the race.
At the start of the convention, held in Stevenson’s home state, the governor still wasn’t a candidate, but his supporters, who had been running a quiet draft effort for months, convinced him to enter the balloting. As expected, Kefauver won a plurality of the delegates on the first ballot, but Stevenson’s support swelled on the second. On the third ballot, the nomination was awarded to Stevenson. It was the last time that either major party’s Presidential nominee didn’t win on the first ballot. (Stevenson, of course, lost to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in the fall.)
Even before House Speaker Paul Ryan stepped in front of an array of American flags on Tuesday and declared, “I do not want, nor will I accept, the nomination for our party,” he was, as a candidate, the closest thing to Adlai Stevenson in modern American politics. Last year, after House rebels pushed Speaker John Boehner into retirement, Ryan repeatedly ruled out replacing him. Ryan’s reluctance, of course, only made House Republicans pursue him with renewed intensity. He not only was elevated to the Speakership but also negotiated a deal in which he didn’t have to work on weekends. Not bad.
On Tuesday, in a press conference that he suspiciously opened by talking about a recent foreign-policy trip to the Middle East, Ryan tried to bat away the idea that he was running a replay of his Speaker’s campaign.
“Apples and oranges,” he said. “Speaker of the House is a far cry from being President of the United States, specifically because I was already in the House. I’m already a congressman, so I was asked by my colleagues to take a responsibility within Congress that I’ve already been serving in from the one that I had. That is entirely different than getting the nomination for President of the United States by your party without even running for the job, so completely non-sequitur comparison in my book.” Ryan even insisted that he would be in favor of a rule at the Republican Convention that would require delegates to nominate someone who had already run in the primaries. (He didn’t mention that rules can be revised between ballots.)
As with Democrats in 1952, the Republicans are likely to arrive at their convention, held in Cleveland in July, divided into factions. Like Kefauver, Donald Trump will have won the most primaries and delegates, but Trump is even more despised by the Party’s elected officials than the Tennessean was. Most projections suggest that Trump will fall short of the twelve hundred and thirty-seven delegates he needs for a first-ballot victory. If that happens, the first ballot will be his high-water mark. On the second ballot, rules in many states allow delegates to be free agents. By the fourth ballot, nearly all delegates are unbound. There is every reason to believe that, as Trump falls, Ted Cruz, who has been far more adept at recruiting and electing the actual delegates, will rise in his standing.
But Trump is a quick study, and he has three months to court the Republicans headed for Cleveland. The fight for delegates will surely intensify, and Trump has some obvious advantages over Cruz. Perhaps a late-June delegate retreat to Mar-a-Lago—or a ride on one of Trump’s three Sikorsky S-76 helicopters—might persuade a few fence-sitters? A Cruz majority on the third or fourth ballot is hardly assured. Cruz may also see some defections. While many establishment Republicans are backing Cruz in the final primaries to block Trump’s path to a majority, at least some of them are secretly hoping that the Convention will nominate someone else entirely.
This combination of forces could produce a stalemate, and that’s when the Ryan solution might become viable.
At his press conference, Ryan made it sound like he was being pressured to formally enter the race as a candidate. But that has never been the scenario imagined by anti-Trump and anti-Cruz Republicans. As Ryan surely knows, his only chance at the nomination is if a desperate Party turns to him after delegates are deadlocked. In that case, the most important thing for Ryan to do is to state clearly, as he did on Tuesday, that he has no interest in the nomination.
There are sound reasons that even a deadlocked convention might not see Ryan as a unifying figure. On policy, Ryan represents the opposite of Trumpism on the key issues of free trade, foreign policy, entitlements, and immigration. But Ryan has also been adept, as any good politician must be, at riding the changing political currents of his party. He personally favors comprehensive immigration reform, but last year he promised Republican hard-liners that he wouldn’t advance a bill on immigration during President Obama’s final year in office. Under the extreme circumstances in which a Ryan candidacy would make sense in Cleveland, similar concessions to Trump and Cruz and their voters are imaginable.
Ryan can’t win the nomination by running. And though he’s still not likely to win it at all, his one chance of having it handed to him is to profess a complete lack of interest in the job, just as he did with the Speakership, and just as Stevenson did the last time a party was as divided as the G.O.P. is today.
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