As Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels inched closer to a decision on whether to seek the presidency in 2012, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., announced this week that he would not run for the U.S. Senate. Their collective decisions could end up having a momentous impact on the nation’s future. By choosing to stay at his post as House Budget Committee chairman rather than attempt to become a junior senator, Ryan put his interest in solving the nation’s long-term debt crisis ahead of higher political ambition. As a senator, he would have been in a stronger position to run for president in 2016.
Ryan is following the lead of the man he has called his “political mentor,” Jack Kemp. As a congressman in 1977, Kemp introduced a bold tax-rate cut proposal with Sen. William Roth, R-Del. It was attacked as radical at the time, and critics predicted it would trigger hyperinflation.
While many Republicans ran from the proposal, one presidential candidate not only embraced it, but made it a focal point of his winning 1980 campaign. In August 1981, four years after the Kemp-Roth measure was introduced, President Reagan signed a modified version of it into law. Reagan-Kemp-Roth not only revived the economy, it changed the trajectory of American history.
“Ronald Reagan was the presiding figure of this era,” Ryan observed in a 2009 speech. “But the great ‘idea formulator’ of that cycle — the political and intellectual entrepreneur whose ideas became the basis of its thinking and policies — was our friend Jack Kemp.”
Ryan, who worked as a speechwriter for Kemp, explained that “Jack not only motivated my first campaign for Congress but also inspired most of the political ideas I ran on and fought for ever since.”
Just as his role model responded to the challenges of the late 1970s, Ryan wrote the “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a sweeping proposal to overhaul the broken entitlement system and put the nation on a sustainable fiscal course while modernizing the tax code. The plan formed the basis for his 2012 budget proposal approved in April by the Republican-controlled House.
While many Republicans were reticent about embracing the boldness of the Ryan approach in 2010, Mitch Daniels was a prominent early supporter. And when Ryan officially unveiled his plan earlier this year, Daniels described it as “the first serious proposal produced by either party to deal with the overriding issue of our time.”
Daniels would have to overcome a number of obstacles were he to run for president. But few deny that he combines a deep understanding of policy with an impressive record of accomplishments as an executive.
And other than Ryan, no Republican has spoken in starker terms about the consequences of the nation’s fiscal crisis than Daniels, who has called it the new “Red Menace.”
The best pitch for a Daniels candidacy thus is that he has the potential to do for the Ryan plan what Reagan did for Kemp’s proposal — turn the ideas into reality.
“[Daniels] would be a great president,” Ryan told The Weekly Standard last year. In the same interview, Ryan described Daniels as the only one who truly understood his ideas.
“Are there [other] people who right now know these issues, have the principles, have the courage of their convictions, and are willing and able to defend them? Nobody comes to my mind,” Ryan said.
For months, Daniels has seemed a reluctant presidential candidate. But perhaps he, too, has a rendezvous with destiny.
Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
