I imagine that, like me, many of you are feeling disillusioned with the presidential election. It is pretty natural at this point in the race to feel campaign fatigue. We’ve been inundated with advertisements, speeches and debates from the candidates for almost two years now. However, this election cycle feels particularly exhausting. Both major parties have drummed up the two most disliked candidates in modern history giving the country a Catch-22 so difficult that our president will not be the person we like the most but the person we hate the least.
So it’s a situation as desperate as this that prompts people to look for something to blame. The candidates, the voters, the country, Congress, the young, the old, Muslims, Mexicans, the rich, the poor or maybe just a bit of everybody. Well, I will present to you someone who deserves and should get a majority of the blame for this election: Paul Ryan.
Now you may be asking, why him? The man didn’t even run in the election how could he possibly deserve the blame? For exactly that reason.
As current speaker of the House, Ryan was considered worthy to be chosen to be the highest-ranking Republican in office, which gives him de facto leader status of the GOP. If he had run for President, his qualifications would have been that he ran with Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign for the office of vice president. He was also the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Budget Committee — two of the most significant and influential committees in the House of Representatives. The guy was practically oozing with presidential pedigree.
Instead, we have Donald Trump. He was the last survivor of a primary with a revolving door of nominees that felt like everyone and their cousin was trying to become president. Arguably, the reason why so many people threw their hats into the ring was because they all thought that they could win.
Trump was — and still is — an unqualified, radical outsider who was a self-proclaimed democrat. He was shaking up the party down to its foundation, and many of the other candidates wanted to bring the party back to traditional moderate conservatism. As Trump continued leading polls and the pool of candidates became so large they couldn’t fit all of them on one debate stage, many abandoned the moderate approach and tried to combat Trump's radicalism. Voters just couldn’t seem to unify around one candidate in particular.
This could’ve been Ryan’s moment. With a wave of his hand, he could have scattered the dozen-plus nominees and trumpeted traditional Republican policies and values. Riding in like a knight in shining armor, he could’ve quickly scooped up the thinly spread electorate and taken Trump head-on. Trump's support would diminish to the extreme alt-right while Ryan, with the complete backing of the Republican leadership, would gain the support of voters who previously couldn’t separate any potential nominee from the laundry list. Trump’s support would’ve faded and he would’ve gone back into reality TV show obscurity.
I am a registered Democrat. I have voted Democrat in the last two elections and I plan to do so again. But I am not happy to be voting for Hillary Clinton. She is not someone who I would normally be voting for, but it shows how badly I don’t want Trump. I know I am not alone in saying that Hillary is not our ideal candidate, but she is who we’ve got. If it was Ryan on the GOP ticket instead of Trump, I would be singing a very different tune. In fact, she’d probably lose the election in a landslide. Even though I do disagree with most of what Ryan stands for, it's impossible to argue that this election would’ve been worse for him running. Instead, the GOP is being torn apart, and the country is too. You may not have caused this, Paul Ryan, but you are certainly to blame.