What is Paul Ryan up to? -- No, I don't think he's running for president.

Paul Ryan -- VP candidate in 2012, Speaker of the House, and the man who will preside over the raucous Republican presidential convention this summer.    People are speculating that he might also become the Republican presidential nominee.

He says he's not running, says he doesn't want to. will not accept a nomination if chosen.    That's what he said before he gave in to his colleagues' pressure to replace John Boehner as Speaker.   So, when he gave a speech last week that sounded like a ready-made campaign ad, conventional wisdom concluded that he would eventually say "yes" again to a draft to save the party.

I have a different idea though.   Let's start with the fact that Paul Ryan knows his way around  the political backrooms.  He's also ambitious and probably would like to be president . . . some day.  Ryan also knows that Republicans are going to lose the presidency in November.    He's already lost one race for the White House;  losing it again could end his future ambitions.   So he's got to be asking:   what are his chances of winning in 2016?

So far, Trump and Cruz together are winning somewhere in the range of three out of every four votes in primaries and caucuses.   If neither gets the magic 50%+ of the delegates before the first convention vote, then what?    With feelings of "disenfranchisement of the primary voters" running so high right now, any attempt to manipulate the convention vote is going to have backlash.  If both are bypassed for some candidate who has not even run (Ryan) or who came in a distant third (Kasich), Trump might walk out with his delegates and run as a third party candidate.   That would mean a huge loss for the party.   Ryan clearly doesn't want that.

As political writer Chris Weigant puts it:  

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"If the national convention ignores the will of roughly three-fourths of Republican primary voters by choosing someone like Ryan, there are going to be millions of very dissatisfied primary voters . . . .  Both Trump and Cruz campaign against their own party’s leadership (in slightly different ways), so their voters are already wary of the party bigwigs. If the convention 'steals the nomination' from Trump and Cruz, it’s going to be very hard to get those millions of voters back into the Republican fold in time for the general election. Ironically, instead of Ryan being a consensus candidate, he might wind up being the most divisive to the party’s base, because both Trump and Cruz voters would be so outraged by the choice."

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So, here's my prediction.   Ryan sees this too and has probably already decided (though he won't say it publicly) to concede the White House in 2016 and to put his efforts into saving Republican control over the House, where he will remain Speaker and thus the most powerful Republican in Washington for the upcoming years.  Setting him up nicely for a presidential run in 2020 or 2024.

So I don't think that was a presidential "campaign ad" he put out last week but, rather, the beginning of his campaign to save the House -- and his long-range chances to be president. Saving down-ticket candidates will require a major effort to counter the negative effects of either Trump or Cruz at the top of a losing ticket.    With Ryan actively campaigning for them, as opposed to the presidential candidate, he might be able to save a few vulnerable House members, as well as state politicians.   It should be a separate, but parallel campaign, with Ryan prominently featured as the party leader -- rather than either Trump or Cruz.

That's how I see it.

Ralph

PS:   I had already written this before news broke of Paul Ryan's forceful statement in an interview yesterday, repeating that he definitely will not be a candidate.