Paul Ryan tries to box in Trump with his convention speech
CLEVELAND — Paul Ryan did his best to disguise it, but his remarks at the Republican convention Tuesday night made it clear that he was less than happy to have declared Donald Trump the party’s nominee for president.
Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House, said if Trump is elected president, the country has “a chance” at having better results than if presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wins.
Ryan, who is from Wisconsin, mentioned Trump’s name only twice in his remarks to the hall. Most of his speech was devoted to doing two things: drawing a contrast between conservative and liberal ideas, and attempting to box Trump into Ryan’s vision of what it means to be a conservative.
There was an air of resignation in his acceptance of Trump’s nomination.
“Democracy is a series of choices. We Republicans have made ours,” Ryan said.
He admitted that the GOP had had “arguments” this year, but called them “signs of life,” at a time “when men and women in both parties so clearly, so undeniably, want a big change in direction for America, a clean break from a failed system.”
Ryan blamed President Obama and “liberal progressive ideas” for a malaise in the country, a situation in which “the whole economy feels stuck.” Ryan called Obama “the most liberal president we’ve had so far.”
But then, as Ryan launched into a recitation of criticisms of Obama’s presidency, half the things he listed were issues or concerns that have been voiced about Trump, sometimes by Ryan himself.
Ryan said Obama had made “discarded promises, empty gestures, phony straw-man arguments,” and that “constitutional limits” had been “brushed off as nothing.”
One of the core reasons Ryan did not endorse Trump immediately after the primary effectively ended in early May was because the speaker said he was not certain that Trump understood or appreciated the constitutional limits on the power of the president.
Ryan also criticized Obama and the Democrats for a “constant dividing up of people, always playing one group against the other, as if group identity were everything.”
“In America, aren’t we all supposed to see beyond class or ethnicity or all those other lines drawn to set us apart and lock us in groups?” Ryan said.
And here again, it was both an explicit knock on Obama and an implicit critique of Trump, who has used inflammatory rhetoric to describe Hispanics, has cast all Muslims as dangerous, and has been slow or even reluctant to distance himself from extremist elements of the white-power movement.
Ryan himself said in June that Trump’s attacks on a federal judge, questioning his impartiality because of his “Mexican heritage,” were the “textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Ryan’s final play to corral Trump was to cast the election as a “contest of ideas.”
And he portrayed the Republican Party, whose nominee has never read a book about any president, as one that offers “a better way for our country, based on fundamentals that go back to the founding generation.”
Republicans, he said, were committed to “following the Constitution, and venturing not one inch beyond the consent of the governed.”
It may be impossible to either restrain Trump or prod him, but Ryan has attempted to do it all year, and will probably keep it up until the election.
_____
Related slideshows:
On the ground at the RNC Convention – A photo report >>>
Melania Trump in the convention spotlight >>>
Convention floor erupts when no roll call taken to change rules to unbind delegates >>>
Demonstrators protest outside the RNC >>>
