The quixotic Lindsey Graham for President campaign never really left the station. Although he turned in a lively performance at several of the undercard debates and was a favorite of reporters to cover on the trail, Graham failed to not just excite but to even draw interest from voters in his White House bid, including in his home state of South Carolina.
How come? Given that Graham was basically running a single-issue campaign on fixing American foreign policy, it would seem that his ardor and expertise would translate into electoral support in what’s been a year of upheaval around the world. It was Graham, after all, who spoke up last spring in favor of deploying 10,000 ground troops to fight ISIS.
But even as he styled himself as the candidate who would undo our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president’s legacy of disengagement from the world, Graham dissed the same constituency who would have rewarded him for it. He called Donald Trump a “jackass,” which famously prompted Trump to give away Graham’s cell phone number to a South Carolina audience. He gave a thumbs up to Bruce Jenner’s sex change when welcoming the newly introduced Caitlyn Jenner into his party. And Graham could never walk back high-profile positions in support of climate change regulation and immigration reform that made him unacceptable to large swaths of GOP primary voters.
It would be easy to say that because of Graham’s profile it was the wrong year for him to run. But the truth is that every year was going to be the wrong year for Lindsey Graham to run for president; he’s not a politician who seems to have ordered anything in his life or legislative career toward that goal. Graham seems to enjoy the personal side of politics, including the colorful gamesmanship, a bit too much for that. My favorite Lindsey Graham line is something he said to his Senate colleague George LeMieux when the Floridian in the Senate gym spontaneously volunteered to fully back his ill-fated climate change plan: “You can’t come that easy.”
In an earlier assessment of Graham, I dubbed he and John McCain the “Last Hawks” of the U.S. Senate. But in 2015 that’s no longer true. Tom Cotton has devoted most of his first year to pushing for a muscular foreign policy. The bloodbath unleashed by ISIS has caused other Washington Republicans to wake up about the Middle East. In other words, we’re a long way from that Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote in 2013 opposing air strikes in Syria.
Even from 0.5 percent in the polls, Lindsey Graham did his part to make sure the next Republican president will make it his mission to fix everything Obama has done around the world. Not a bad legacy for a presidential candidate who never really was one.
Rich Danker is executive director of the Lone Star Committee, an independent political organization supporting Ted Cruz. He previously managed Jeff Bell’s Senate campaign.
