House speaker Paul Ryan is not running for president. That became clear several months after the 2012 election, in which Ryan was Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate. At two private dinners, a prominent Republican introduced Ryan to a bipartisan group of influential policy intellectuals and potential campaign financiers, not all of them conservatives. Ryan didn’t bite.
It’s now three years later, and he hasn’t changed his mind. Ryan will preside over the Republican convention in July, but he says even if the presidential nomination is contested, he won’t seek or accept it. “I actually think you should run for president . . . if you want to be president,” he told reporters last week.
The next day, just to nail down his unavailability, Ryan said there are no circumstances in which he would become the nominee. “No, there isn’t,” he said. “ ’No’ is the answer. Definitively.”
Yet Ryan is playing an enormously important role in 2016. He is the chief protector of the kind of conservatism that attracted him to politics and motivates most Republicans. “I’m a Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan conservative,” he declared in February in a speech at the Heritage Action Conservative Policy Summit.
This role involves more than defending conservative ideas and policies. He is committed to sweeping aside the chaos, noisemaking, and rancor that has engulfed the presidential race and thus the Republican party itself. He has advised Republicans to stick to the “higher standard of decorum” to which the GOP has traditionally adhered. “We disagreed — often fiercely so — but we disagreed without being disagreeable,” he told a bipartisan group of House interns.
Ryan didn’t target Donald Trump by name. He never does. But if Trump— or to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz — thinks Ryan was referring to anyone else, he’s mistaken. He may be unaware that Ryan hasn’t been changed by the impact of the Trump candidacy, nor by the fury of reckless partisans, talk radio, a few widely read websites, or a clique of conservative organizations.
Rare among Republicans, Ryan has ignored Trump’s provocations. After Ryan’s “higher standard” speech, Trump scheduled a rally in the speaker’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin. Asked by reporters what issues he and Ryan might work on jointly, Trump abruptly changed the subject to how foreign trade has damaged Wisconsin. Ryan favors free trade and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty now before Congress.
Nor has Ryan joined those who have announced they will never vote for Trump, even if he is the Republican nominee. Ryan has planted himself on higher ground.
After losing the popular vote in five of the past six presidential races, Republicans may want to copy the tactics of President Obama, Ryan said in December, five weeks after he was elected speaker. “Maybe the way to win the debate is to play identity politics, never mind ideas. Maybe what you do is slice and dice the electorate: Demonize. Polarize. Turn out your voters. Hope the rest stay home. And I would just say, yes, it’s possible we could win that way — but to what end?”
Ryan didn’t point directly to Trump’s campaign tactics. It was two months before the first contest in Iowa. But Trump had been the frontrunner in the GOP race since July at that point. There’s no one else Ryan could have had in mind.
In a January appearance on Fox News, Ryan outlined his priorities for the House this year. They are national security, jobs and economic growth, health care, poverty and opportunity, and “restoring” the Constitution. According to Ryan’s plan, what the House does on these issues will be models for a Republican administration, even one with Trump in the White House.
The Ryan agenda matters whether Republicans win the presidency or not. Trump would be an underdog in the general election. In the unlikely event he captures the presidency, however, he would have Ryan as well as Democrats to contend with.
“This country has big problems,” Ryan said in December. “But if we do not have a president who will work with us, we will not solve those problems — that is, while they are still solvable.” He was talking about a Democratic president, but his concern would apply as well to President Trump.
Would Ryan take President Trump’s agenda as his own and push for its passage? I don’t think so. In exit polls in primary states, more Republican voters than not said they favor allowing most illegal immigrants to stay in America legally. This sentiment, which is also reflected in polls, plus Ryan’s support for legalization would make Trump’s promise to deport illegals a nonstarter.
On trade, Trump would withdraw from the TPP, which many Republicans oppose. But Ryan would make the case for new trade agreements. “If you add up all the countries that do not have a trade agreement with us, we have a big manufacturing trade deficit,” he said in December. “But if you add up all the countries that do have a trade agreement with us, we have a surplus.”
Ryan’s biggest task would be preserving the conservatism of Reagan and Kemp. It’s based, Ryan says, on principles of “freedom, liberty, free enterprise, self-determination, government by consent.” More specifically that means lower taxes, less government intrusion, free markets, conservative solutions to poverty, strong defense, and renewed American influence in the world.
Though Ryan’s intentions are clear, some of his fans won’t give up. Mort Kondracke wrote recently that “the way things are going in the presidential race, I’m going to write in Paul D. Ryan. Join me. . . . If enough of us moderates (Rs and Ds) and independents do it all over the country, Ryan won’t get elected, but we can make a ringing statement about the kind of president we want — and don’t want.” Donald Trump, please take notice.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard and co-author, with Morton Kondracke, of Jack Kemp: The Bleeding Heart Conservative Who Changed America (Sentinel, 2015).
