Things could barely be going better for Ryan. An incredibly ambitious politician, he’s managed to rise all the way to speaker of the House at age 46 while maintaining the fiction that he isn’t really ambitious, he just cares about issues. He played the reluctant savior when becoming speaker, proclaiming his lack of interest in the job, which made Republicans bow down before him in supplication before he finally, generously agreed to heed their anguished cries. And now something similar is happening with the GOP nomination: He says he doesn’t want it, which makes his fans all the more eager for him to deliver them from the Trumpian catastrophe that awaits in November.
It’s kind of an inverse of Groucho Marx’s quip that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member: Only by saying you aren’t interested in leading Republicans can you demonstrate that you’re worthy of taking that mantle.
Ryan has said that the nominee should be someone who put in the work of running for president, even if there’s a contested convention. He surely knows that polls show the vast majority of Republicans agree. He also knows that saying so won’t stop the speculation, since everyone remembers how he said he wasn’t interested in becoming speaker. And the news media is obsessed with the idea of a gripping convention fight, a story in which the possibility of Ryan’s nomination will continue to play a central role.
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