The world finally caught on to Paul Ryan's game last week.
The
speaker of the House might not survive his inability to find enough
Republicans to vote for his deeply unpopular and poorly crafted American
Health Care Act—a gratuitously cruel bill that Donald Trump, for no apparent reason, had embraced so completely that Ryan's bill became Trump's bill (TrumpRyanCare, as I called it) and Ryan's failure became Trump's failure.
One
of Trump's strongest supporters on Fox News (which is filled with
people vying to be Trump's strongest supporter) immediately called for
Ryan to go. The editors of The New York Times paired their scathing criticism of Ryan with a brilliant caricature showing Ryan as a tiny head on top of an oversized suit. I have been calling Ryan an empty suit for years, so that one was especially fun to see.
I
am not predicting that Ryan will actually be taken down by this latest
display of his emptiness. I have no greater predictive powers about such
matters than anyone else, and if I possessed such powers, I would be
inclined to use them for better purposes. Instead, I want to explain why
Ryan should want to treat this situation not as a threat but as an
opportunity to leave Congress.
Politicians
are notoriously short-term thinkers, and even though Ryan has always
pretended to be a big picture, long-term strategist, he has shown no
greater ability or inclination than his colleagues to transcend the
moment-by-moment reactive behavior of any ambitious political hack. If
he could force himself to think strategically, however, he might
conclude that this is a good time to go, and that he could gain more
than he loses by doing so.
The most obvious upside of leaving Congress would be that Ryan would no longer have to be, as I described him recently,
Donald Trump's "chew toy." From the primaries onward, Ryan has found
himself having to backtrack from his occasional criticisms of Trump, and
he mostly spends his time now avoiding talking about Trump's outrageous
presidency.
For example, after Trump issued his Muslim immigration ban in January, Ryan reportedly
"released a statement on Friday praising the order, but his aides
repeatedly declined requests for further comment." Ryan seems to spend
more time claiming that he is not paying attention to Trump than it
would take to pay attention to Trump.
Moreover,
as noted above, Ryan's free ride in the press looks like it has finally
hit its expiration date. He used to enjoy coverage from respected
journalists who could not stop themselves from writing fluff like this:
With his youthful earnestness, genial personality and devotion to
conservative policy, Paul Ryan enjoyed a special stature within GOP even
before he became House speaker late last year.
Almost
no one—certainly not the author of the article linked in the paragraph
above—bothered to notice that Ryan routinely stated as fact demonstrably
false things about Social Security and Medicare's "bankruptcy," or that
Ryan talks about how we must "tackle our debt crisis" even though there
is no debt crisis—and even if there were one, all of Ryan's plans would
make it worse.
Some
liberal-leaning commentators, of course, saw through Ryan from the
beginning. Paul Krugman might be the only person who has written more
negative things about Ryan than I have. Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein have taken more measured tones, but they had figured out Ryan's con at least as early as 2012.
Interestingly, however, it is not the long-obvious emptiness
of Ryan's "serious policy guy" image that has finally put his career on
the line. Apparently, his big sin is that after slapping together an
unpopular bill, he made his president look bad by failing to get
Republicans to vote for it.
If
anything, Trump should be thanking Ryan for being unable to deliver the
votes. Nothing good politically was going to happen for any Republican
if the House had passed the bill, starting with a huge intra-party civil
war in the Senate and—if the bill somehow became law—hanging ownership
of every complaint about health care on Trump and the Republicans
forevermore.
I guess we should not be surprised that the Republicans have already started talking
about having another run at the repeal-and-replace windmill. And if
Ryan stays on, he will surely put his transparently regressive policy
preferences into a bill that will improve Democrats' political fortunes
whether it passes or not.
If
he left office, Ryan could relieve himself of a lot of headaches and
still get out before his carefully crafted image is destroyed.
But
Ryan is still only 47 years old, and he knows nothing but Beltway life,
having been in the House since 1999 (before his 29th birthday) and
having served on political staffs and right-wing D.C. think tanks before
that. What would he do if he were to stop messing up his job as speaker
of the House? Run for president, of course.
Given
his addiction to political power, it seems unlikely that Ryan would be
satisfied making big money as a Wall Street consultant, in the manner of
Ryan's former "young guns" colleague Eric Cantor. Ryan is dedicated to
helping rich people become richer at the expense of everyone else, not
to becoming rich himself.
But
the obvious model for Ryan would be another former speaker of the
House, Newt Gingrich. Like Gingrich, Ryan would be leaving office as a
fallen star of his party who had become expendable when his weaknesses
caused Republicans to feel distress.
Like
Gingrich, Ryan can still nurture his unearned reputation for being his
party's Ideas Guy. I do not have many good things to say about Maureen
Dowd, the op-ed columnist for The New York Times, but I still enjoy her comment
about Gingrich from 2011: "He prides himself, after all, on being a man
of ideas. It is rarely mentioned that the ideas are mostly
chuckleheaded."
And so it is with Ryan, who is if anything even worse on substance than Gingrich, if that is possible.
Even
so, Gingrich's afterlife has been surprisingly robust. Incredibly, he
was one of the last men standing in the 2012 Republican primaries. It is
true that his longevity in that campaign derived mostly from having a
sugar daddy, but there is no reason to think that Ryan could not find
someone even sweeter, given how much work he has done for the
billionaires of the world.
The most important difference, however, is that Gingrich has always been openly abrasive. When I asked, in a column
title in late 2011, "Will Americans Elect an Unbearably Pompous
President?" there was no shortage of material to demonstrate Gingrich's
unlikability. Ryan, by contrast, has always gotten ahead by looking
sincere and claiming to care about people. Many, many people fall for
it.
If
Ryan has any thoughts about becoming president—and who doubts that he
does?—running as a former speaker who was wrongly blamed for the
failures of an orange-hued blowhard is not a bad position from which to start. And not having a day job makes it all easier.
In
the meantime, Ryan can continue to tell stories about how he helped to
prevent Hillary Clinton's imaginary socialist takeover, and the press
will quickly revert to their reverential treatment of his every
utterance, no matter his laughable lack of expertise or substance. The
lecture circuit is a very forgiving place.
Ryan's
alternative is to wait until his Republican colleagues dump him
unceremoniously for not doing everything they want him to do. He has
decades in which to make a political comeback, during which time he
might want to be governor of Wisconsin (and enough Wisconsinites might
actually vote for him).
Either
that or he can stay on as Trump's chew toy, waiting for the inevitable
day when he is no longer a tasty morsel and is thrown into the garbage.
