Paul Ryan - Are Republicans Out of Their Minds?

In answer to the title of this post, I'd say that, yes, most Republicans are out of their minds. The few that aren't batshit crazy or drinking laced Christianist Kool-Aid are worrying how to avoid blowing an opportunity to defeat Obama in 2012. The current GOP presidential candidate field leaves much to be desired by rational Republicans. Perry and Bachmann are religious extremists while Romney has no personality and his Mormon faith makes him anathema to the Christianist base of the GOP. Thus, the question becomes one of who can be coaxed into getting into the race. As a New Republic piece discusses, some want to recruit Paul Ryan, although Ryan - even though the Tea Party crowd might support him - might be radioactive enough to energize Democrats. That the GOP finds itself without a decent candidate is largely the leadership's fault. They've allowed the party to become so sectarian and so far to the right that rational candidates may find it impossible to be nominated. Here are highlights from the TNR story:

The sub-headline in Stephen Hayes’ latest Weekly Standard post trumpeting the possible emergence of a Paul Ryan presidential campaign lists some big political names who are encouraging the idea: “Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, John Boehner, Jim Jordan, and Bill Bennett encourage Ryan to run for president.”

A Ryan candidacy, in other words, would rigidly align the GOP with its least popular ideas at the very moment that all Democrats, from the president to the lowliest House candidate, are desperate to make this a “comparative” election instead of a temperature reading on life in the Obama era. So why would prominent Republicans be interested in making Democrats so very happy?

One explanation is that Paul Ryan may be simply too emblematic of contemporary Republican thinking to be resisted by his own party. As TNR’s Jonathan Chait (one of the few progressive commentators who have consistently predicted Ryan would run) put it, “He is adored by party activists and elites in equal measure and is the embodiment of the party consensus.”

But my hunch is that the main motivation behind the growing Ryan boom in elite circles is that Republicans have more or less decided they cannot lose the presidential race in 2012 unless their candidate has big personal flaws or comes off as legitimately crazy. As a result, they are beginning to assess the field in terms of capacity to serve as president rather than mere electability. And they don’t like what they see. Tim Pawlenty would have been fine, but he’s gone. Mitt Romney would be fine, as well, but he may struggle to win the nomination, leaving the field (unless someone like Ryan enters) to less-fine candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

This we-can’t-lose, so-let’s-win-right point of view was most clearly expressed the other day by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: Romney and Perry will be competing to face possibly the weakest incumbent since Jimmy Carter, with the world in turmoil and the economy adrift. Six months ago, it still seemed as if Republican primary voters might be choosing a sacrificial lamb to run against Barack Obama. Now it looks as if they might be choosing the next president. This should inspire Republicans to return, yet again, to the question that has dogged their party’s field all year. Is this really the best we can do?

The bottom line is that growing Republican optimism about 2012 is leading GOP elites to think seriously about candidates like Ryan, whose popularity among grassroots rank-and-file Republicans makes his nomination at least a realistic, if still a long-shot, scenario. But the same calculation could lead to a general election campaign that gives pessimistic Democrats a seriously renewed hope for victory.