Ramaswamy and Christie, get outta here, now!
Hugo Gurdon
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Presidential primaries tend to produce one “interesting candidate.” The phrase is not wholly complimentary, for it identifies one of the hopefuls who have, in truth, no hope of winning. The candidate is evidently intelligent, highly unconventional, and less like any of the others than they are like each other.
In 2020, for example, when Democrats were assessing who should be their champion to take on then-President Donald Trump, the interesting primary candidate was Andrew Yang, who was relatively young, smart, successful, and had no chance of being picked by his party.
CEASEFIRE REJECTION UNDERSCORES WHY HAMAS MUST GO
Now that Republicans are deciding who will take on President Joe Biden, the Democratic incumbent, the interesting candidate in the field of challengers is Vivek Ramaswamy. Actually, I should say he “was” rather than “is” the interesting candidate because he latterly has vied to be the most tedious and superfluous candidate of all.
His transformation from being interesting to being a grating embarrassment took about 45 minutes, by my count, from the opening bell to about halfway through the first Republican debate last August. While watching the encounter on TV, I was texting impressions back and forth with a couple of politically savvy friends. After 15 minutes, they asked who I thought was winning. At that point, Ramaswamy seemed the most fluent and effective, even though he was not who I’d choose for nominee. So I texted that I thought he was winning.
My wise friends texted back in horror and half an hour later, I was mildly embarrassed to have suggested such a thing, even though I was revealing my analysis, not my preference. For by then, Ramaswamy had revealed himself nationally to be glib and evasive; all sizzle and no steak, an excited gadfly rather than a man with any credible claim to lead a serious political party.
Republican voters are now, at last, coming to the same conclusion. Ramaswamy is failing, as was long inevitable. He has just canceled all his TV advertising even though the Iowa caucuses are only three weeks away. Naturally, his campaign pooh-poohs the idea that this is a distress flare fired from a sinking ship and claims it is, rather, a strategic decision to focus on getting identified supporters to the polls to cast their ballots. But it is what it always is — a sign that the campaign is creaking and cracking, and its raison d’être has dwindled from winning to saving face.
One thing the campaign is, sadly, probably telling the truth about is that canceling TV slots does not presage Ramaswamy dropping out. He says there’ll be a “big surprise” on caucus day, Jan 15. Maybe there will; maybe he’ll pick up more than the 4% support he garners nationally in the RealClearPolitics average and the 5.9% he gets in Iowa.
Either way, his campaign is now exposed as a vanity project, and every day he hangs around like a bad smell stinking up the primary the more he helps diffuse Republican support for someone else who could win and go on to beat Biden in November next year.
The other candidate who is all about vanity and who will only do harm for as long as he refuses to leave the field is former Gov. Chris Christie (NJ). His campaign was not built on being interesting but on a single conceit — in both senses of the word — that he’d confront Trump more forcefully than any other candidate dared to do.
The falsehood of this is exposed not just by other candidates who have been prepared to challenge Trump directly. Nor is it mocked only by the fact that Trump has not shown up to debate, so Christie has been left to tilt at windmills rather than at a corporeal rival. It is also that Christie’s plain-spoken, bully-boy prosecutor image was always bogus. It is his boast, and if you’re boasting, you’re being vain, not plain-spoken. You’re frothing up your sole credential like a single-egg soufflé, which you hope won’t collapse upon close inspection in the cold light of day. Unlike the candidate himself, the soufflé has already collapsed. Christie does not figure in Iowa, and he is trailing a distant third in his must-succeed state, New Hampshire.
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Like Ramaswamy, he won’t get out of the race. He has tried to pretend he’s an irresistible force, but he turned out to be only an immovable object. He can do no good but plenty of harm, dividing anti-Trump voters into rival camps and preventing them from coalescing around more plausible alternatives, former Gov. Nikki Haley (SC) and even the ailing Gov. Ron DeSantis (FL).
Neither Ramaswamy nor Christie has any respectable reason still to be in the race. Theirs are simply vanity candidacies. They’re not men on the move but men in the way. Their continued presence only makes it more likely that they nation will get the Biden-Trump rematch from which it does not benefit and which it does not want.