DAN HENNINGER: THE PAUL RYAN FACTOR
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303795304576456273128265368.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The Paul Ryan Factor Non-Obama voters want a presidential contender who can do hand-to-hand policy combat with the incumbent in 2012.
“Don’t read this as a Ryan endorsement. Read it as an endorsement of the discontented voters who understand they need a candidate with the skill set to take on Barack Obama with more than sophisticated blather. If that’s the battleground, the president wins.”
I am beginning to think that the Draft Ryan movement is about something other than Paul Ryan. And that something is disagreement with the simple notion that all that matters is finding a hero who can defeat Barack Obama. Voters sense this election is wading into deeper waters than that.
Chris Christie understands this. After Paul Ryan, New Jersey’s governor is the second most-mentioned GOP presidential hero. Gov. Christie says he’s not ready to run for president. He’s right. Not this time. Chris Christie has remarkable political and people skills. But his success in New Jersey has much to do with the fact that he mastered the deep, complex details of his state at its moment of crisis. He knows that he is in no way prepared to bring that level of knowledge to the debate voters want about the federal crisis.
I think the American electorate understands that next year’s choice of a president is not about anything so unfocused as “the future of our country.” The dissatisfaction with the GOP candidates reflects the awareness that the 2012 election isn’t about 50 states. It’s about the financial structure of one place—the nation’s capital.
In the 1960s we had civil-rights elections. In the 1980s we had Cold War and American greatness elections. In 2012 we’re going to have an election about money. Washington’s money and ours.
Three dormant financial volcanoes have sat beneath U.S. presidential elections for a generation: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Combined, they hold enough lava to one day turn the United States into a kind of economic Pompeii, trapped in the eternal sludge of its entitlements. Until recently, daily life went on in the U.S. from one election to the next, alongside the rumbling volcanoes. Three events changed the American electorate’s view of Washington’s spending commitments from watchful waiting to active case-management.
The first was the 2008 financial crisis. The damage those events did to savings, employment and people’s sense of financial security forced the public to focus acutely on money—theirs and the government’s. Even as people’s life assets turned precarious, they read about the scale of the government’s long-term revenue needs. You could be for or against the 2009 stimulus, but its $831 billion price tag hit nearly everyone as sticker shock. Wondering who exactly is going to pay for all this is no longer just conservative blowback. It is an obvious question.
With the country mesmerized by these tense, post-2008 financial issues, along came the Obama health-care initiative. Incredibly, a whole nation’s people focused for a year on the details of a bill about health care and insurance. With its passage, the country knew it had a fourth long-term entitlement.
We’re now engulfed by a third monumental event that is about how Washington manages money: the debt ceiling. The details of the fight over tax increases and spending cuts matter, but the political impact of one detail matters most: The debt ceiling has hit $14 trillion, and the U.S. is on the cusp of a ratings downgrade.
Non-Obama voters want a presidential contender who can do hand-to-hand policy combat with the incumbent in 2012.
What Republicans and ideologically independent voters want is a GOP candidate willing—and more importantly, able—to engage Barack Obama frontally and in detail over the future of the spending commitments embedded in the events of the past three years and the past 70 years. Mr. Obama wants spending to rise to 25% of GDP to support those commitments for the next 70 years. Until we settle this and the taxes it implies, everything else a candidate may propose, such as devolving power away from Washington, is beside the point because it won’t be possible.
Mitt Romney is the front-runner, and that status attracts attention. To date, what non-Obama voters see, and fear, is a candidate content to coast to the nomination and then conduct a blandly conservative campaign. They want a more substantive choice than that. They want to have it out over the worth or danger of Barack Obama’s ideas. They want the chance to ratify Washington’s enormous long-term claims on the country’s wealth, or decisively reject them.
When people say they “like” Paul Ryan it is because they see him as a kind of political Navy SEAL, someone with the specialized knowledge needed to do hand-to-hand policy combat with an incumbent president who represents a once-and-for-all assertion of Washington’s primacy. And make no mistake: It will take a virtual commando team of Washington insiders to run the political labyrinths to the central processing units of the country’s four massive entitlement factories.
Don’t read this as a Ryan endorsement. Read it as an endorsement of the discontented voters who understand they need a candidate with the skill set to take on Barack Obama with more than sophisticated blather. If that’s the battleground, the president wins.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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