Philip Klein agrees that Ryan’s chances of winning the Republican nomination are not very good:

That’s why I think the more fundamental question is whether, given Ryan’s lack of executive experience, there’s a broad enough coalition that would welcome his message and choose him over the other alternatives.

I’d like to think that there’s a path to the nomination for Ryan, but I’ve been thinking about it all week, and it’s difficult to see.

Klein compares a Ryan candidacy to Bill Bradley’s 2000 challenge to Al Gore, whose appeal was mostly limited to “educated and affluent white voters.” Ryan doesn’t have any obvious liabilities on social issues, so social conservatives wouldn’t dismiss him, but it isn’t clear why they would rally behind him when they have alternatives. Many Ryan boosters overrate his chances because they place too much importance on his expertise and intelligence. The most wonkish candidates tend not to flourish in either party, and a candidate whose main reason for running is that he is a budget wonk will understandably have difficulty generating enthusiasm among voters. Obviously, Ryan generates enthusiasm among pundits and insiders, but that’s very different. If campaigns prospered because of pundit attention and respect, Tim Pawlenty would still be in the race.

Quin Hillyer doesn’t see why Ryan wouldn’t receive the nomination:

Ryan’s record and persona mean that he is one of the few candidates that can pull from multiple voter groups at once.

In theory, this makes sense, but it was just this sort of theoretical acceptability in Pawlenty’s case that failed to translate into real support. For the record, Ryan’s district isn’t “slightly Democrat-leaning.” Wisconsin’s First District has a PVI of R+2, and it gave Bush more than 50% of the vote both times. It would be fair to call it a presidential swing district, but in terms of House voting it has been solidly Republican since 1994. Like all safe House incumbents, Ryan racks up gaudy double-digit re-election victories.

Michael Medved reports from inside the bubble where everyone he knows thinks a Ryan run is a brilliant idea, and goes on to say this:

Tim Pawlenty tried to emphasize these themes with his aspirational target of 5 percent annual GDP growth, but despite his impressive gubernatorial record, the Minnesotan proved too timid and tenuous to make the sale and withdrew from the race. Now Ryan can pick up that abandoned banner and rally the troops.

It’s true that Ryan would be inclined to make implausible assumptions about growth and incorporate them into his budgeting, but Medved seems to be overlooking that this was one of the things in Pawlenty’s economic plan that was most ridiculed. It was also the aspect of Ryan’s budget proposal that came in for some of the harshest criticism. Ross remarked on Ryan’s budget proposal earlier this year:

One of the great virtues of Paul Ryan’s approach to spending and deficits over the last two years has been his refusal to embrace the pernicious right-wing fantasy, beloved of overzealous supply-siders in the Bush era, that marginal tax cuts usually more than pay for themselves, making serious spending cuts unnecessary. Which is why it’s disappointing to see that while his budget uses C.B.O. projections for economic growth to build its numbers, it also throws in Heritage Foundation estimates of the budget’s macroeconomic impact — estimates which are so transparently ridiculous (2.8 percent unemployment! a unicorn in every pot!) that even their own authors don’t stand behind them. In a budget whose chief selling point is its honesty about the fiscal situation, it’s jarring — and potentially discrediting — to have right-wing fantasy economics making a cameo appearance.

Unwittingly, Medved has just pointed out one of Ryan’s weaknesses (the readiness to endorse ridiculous expectations of growth), and he mistakenly considers it to be one of Ryan’s great advantages. This seems to be typical of Ryan boosters. Their enthusiasm for the candidate keeps them from recognizing the obvious pitfalls of a Ryan campaign. Medved continues:

With the Democrats planning to spend $1 billion to terrify the public about wacky Republicans, Ryan would prove more difficult to demonize than his rivals….How would they slam Paul Ryan?

If Medved can’t imagine how Democrats would attack Ryan, he clearly hasn’t thought through the implications of what he’s saying. I expect that the Democrats would launch two attacks on Ryan: one would focus on his support for vastly increasing the federal government’s unfunded liabilities, and another would rail against him for threatening the Medicare status quo on the other. Ryan is unusually vulnerable to having participated in the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society, which he has followed up with entitlement reform proposals that seem sure to drive away middle-class voters.

Coming back to Ryan’s nomination prospects, John McCormack has done his best to refute the argument that Ryan has serious vulnerabilities. However, he inadvertently acknowledges that Ryan’s path to the nomination has a major obstacle:

For Ryan to win the nomination, he’d have to win New Hampshire.

Whatever else happens in the early contests, Romney is the clear favorite to win New Hampshire, and it is hard to see how anyone, including Ryan, is going to overtake Romney with his enormous built-in advantages and organization in the state. McCormack doesn’t admit that the need to win New Hampshire means that Ryan’s candidacy is almost certain to fail. We know that Ryanmania has fully taken hold when he writes, “Money really isn’t a big issue.” Certainly, money by itself isn’t enough, but Ryan would need to have plenty of it and quickly just so that he could make himself known.

Seth Mandel sees the enthusiasm for Paul Ryan as an attempt to compensate for the absence of Mitch Daniels:

But the point that Daniels’ supporters kept making was that he appealed to voters across partisan lines. And they were, in many cases, correct. But they cannot summon a Ryan candidacy from the wreckage of the failed campaign to draft Daniels. Ryan seems to have a bright career ahead of him. That career is unlikely to benefit, and may even suffer, from a presidential candidacy this year.

Oddly, one of the people involved in urging Paul Ryan to run is none other than Mitch Daniels. Daniels decided against a campaign earlier this year for understandable family reasons, but it’s worth remembering how much resistance the prospect of a Daniels candidacy met when it was still a possibility. He had barely flirted with a presidential bid, and he was already being denounced as a sell-out on social issues and a wimp on national security. On foreign policy, Ryan has gone out of his way to make sure that he doesn’t have Daniels’ problem by pledging allegiance to perpetual hegemony, but that just re-confirms that a Ryan candidacy would be at odds with the mood of the party and the public.

I don’t have much of a sense of how competitive Elizabeth Warren would be in a race against Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, but Robert Kuttner’s analysis of Brown’s weakenesses doesn’t make much sense (via Weigel):

It is universally agreed by Massachusetts political observers that she is the only Democratic candidate with a decent shot at beating Scott Brown, a man who won in a fluke. Don’t forget, he based his entire candidacy on a pledge to destroy Obama’s Affordable Care Act, a law with an uncanny similarity to Massachusetts’ own, highly popular universal health law. Think that will play well in the commonwealth? Or his social conservatism in one of the most socially liberal of states?

In fact, Brown campaigned against the ACA by arguing that it would undermine Massachusetts’ system. He opposed federal health care legislation on the basis of that profound principle, “I’ve got mine,” and rallied around the state-level status quo. Brown knew that the Massachusetts law was overwhelmingly popular in his state, so he positioned himself as the one who would defend it by voting against the ACA. As for Brown’s “social conservatism,” I have to ask: what social conservatism? Brown is about as pro-choice a Republican as one is likely to find in elected office nowadays, and his support for civil unions is as far as most national Republicans are likely to go. Unless we’re defining social conservatism so broadly that it ceases to mean very much, it’s simply wrong to say that Brown is a social conservative.

It seems that Brown is quite popular in his state. According to a poll commissioned by the DSCC in March, his approval rating was 73%. More recent polls have Brown at lower, less ridiculous levels of approval. Steve Kornacki commented at the time of the March poll:

True, 2012 will be a presidential election year, which will theoretically boost Brown’s challenger in blue state Massachusetts. But it’s easy to overstate the coattail effect, as Susan Collins demonstrated in 2008, when she easily beat a strong Democratic challenger even as Barack Obama comfortably won Maine. In other words, unless Brown’s numbers dip markedly, it’s likely that Democrats will be stuck with a second-tier (at best) challenger in ’12.

Is Warren going to be more competitive than that? A poll commissioned by Brown’s campaign found him winning 53% of the vote in a match-up against Warren, who received 28%. One of Warren’s obstacles is that she isn’t very well-known. Somehow, I don’t think it is going to be Warren’s coattails that will be bringing Obama victory in Massachusetts.

The administration has called for Assad to step down and imposed some additional economic sanctions. Is this “mostly harmless,” as Dan Drezner says? Probably, but only because everyone seems to understand that there seems to be very little that the U.S. can or will do to bring about the outcome that it says should happen. If I were the type to worry about diminishing American “credibility,” I might wonder what purpose is served by calling for Assad’s departure when we all understand that this call will be ignored like all the others. However, I normally find most arguments that appeal to “credibility” to be the last resort of those with no real argument, and this is no different.

Calling for Assad’s departure is also most certainly a form of meddling in Syrian affairs. It is fairly mild meddling right now, but it is meddling all the same, and we have seen how similar “mostly harmless” gestures can become traps for the governments that make them. It’s worth remembering that it was just two weeks between saying that Gaddafi “must go” and the start of the Libyan war. Before long, the administration was making policy on Libya based on just such a “harmless” statement. Back in early March, intervening in Libya seemed absurd. Almost everyone was convinced that it wasn’t going to happen. The administration was sending many signals in public that it wasn’t going to happen. Then the war of caprice began. That was almost five months ago.

It is apparently the case that Libya has taught the U.S., Britain, and France not to do the same thing again anytime soon, and Libya may make it practically impossible for some of these governments to do anything, and we all know the many differences between Libya and Syria. Everything we think we know tells us that intervention in Syria can’t happen, that it’s irrational and impossible, and that our forces are already overstretched as it is. Then again, that is just what we thought before the bombing of Libya began. Back in March, it seemed nearly impossible that Western governments would attack Libya. Libya wasn’t even a hostile state! How stupid would we have to be to attack a relatively friendly government? Besides, surely the experience of Iraq would have chastened Western governments? It didn’t. Surely they would have learned from the long slog in both Iraq and Afghanistan that launching another military campaign would turn into a much longer, more costly mission than the one they expected? Nope.

The arguments against intervention in Syria are very strong. Even the Syrian opposition doesn’t want outside intervention of the Libyan kind. An attack would probably help the regime at least in the short term to turn everyone’s attention to the attacking governments. The regional consequences of attacking Syria and the dangers of a wider conflict are so many and grave that it is doubtful that any of the governments currently bombing Libya would be mad enough to try it. On the other hand, a person would have already lost a lot of money this year betting on the good judgment of these governments. When the leaders of several major Western military powers start issuing imperatives to other governments about what they “must” do, we can’t ever fully rule out that they will commit a new blunder by taking military action. In the very recent past, just such a blunder began with what initially seemed like a throwaway line, an empty rhetorical nod to a popular uprising, and that war is still going on.

Walter Russell Mead has written an essay on Erdogan’s “big idea,” which forces him into a strained comparison with the Megali Idea. He then writes:

This is not about conquest or the restoration of an actual empire — the Turks are subtler than were the Greeks.

So the “big idea” that Turkey has doesn’t really resemble the Megali Idea at all. The latter is often described as the goal of restoring the Byzantine empire, and Mead describes it this way, but it is better understood as the modern nationalist appropriation of a medieval precedent to justify irredentist policies. These policies were first and foremost concerned with the acquisition of territory and the integration of Greek-speaking and Orthodox communities into the Greek nation-state. This is not a question of whether “Turks are subtler” or not. Modern Turkey is doing something fundamentally different from what Venizelos was trying to do. Unlike Venizelos, Erdogan is doing this mostly against the wishes of major Western powers.

One of the many things that distinguished Atatürk from Enver Pasha was his rejection of wasteful, exhausting campaigns fought in the name of pan-Turkish nationalism. In that way, he was the opposite of Venizelos. If Erdogan is not interested in “conquest or the restoration of an actual empire,” and he isn’t, that puts him squarely in Atatürk’s tradition of Anatolian Turkish nationalism. The opposition between Erdogan’s “eastern” orientation and Atatürk’s “western” one is misleading in some important respects. Especially in the early days of the republic, Atatürk may have been a Westernizer at home, but he was more inclined to have good relations with Turkey’s eastern and northern neighbors than he was with the Western powers that had just tried to dismember Turkey. The pro-Western geopolitical orientation of Turkey that so many associate with Atatürk was the product of the Cold War, and it came into existence over a decade after Atatürk’s death. The reality is that Erdogan’s Turkey is still far more oriented towards the West, and vastly more economically integrated into Europe, than it ever was under Atatürk. Turkey is trying to wield greater influence in its immediate neighborhood as regional powers do.

Mead envisions a future rivalry between Turkey and Iran. Certainly, there is sharp disagreement between the two over the Syrian crackdown right now, and that could lead to an unraveling of the relationship the two have been building, but Turkey has many economic and political incentives to avoid “taking on” Iran. “Taking on” Iran is something that anti-AKP Westerners want Turkey to do. It does not appear to be something that the AKP or most Turks want to do.

The newreviews of Renny Harlin’s very bad5 Days of War haven’t interested me very much, but I noticed that the report in The New York Times on the movie’s (American) release did a poor job of describing the facts surrounding the war’s beginning:

The fighting began when Moscow invaded Georgia ostensibly to end atrocities against ethnic minority separatists in the South Ossetia region, while Georgia contended that Moscow was dressing up expansionism with bogus humanitarian intervention.

As The Christian Science Monitor‘s report on the anniversary of the 2008 war stated:

Though Tbilisi still officially maintains that Russia started the war in an effort to unseat its pro-Western president, Mikhael Saakashvili, there seems no doubt that the war began on the night of Aug. 7 with a massive Georgian bombardment and armored assault on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. The attack resulted in the death of several Russian peacekeeping troops stationed there under international accords.

The assault on Tskhinvali and the presence of Russian forces in South Ossetia prior to the attack receive no mention in the NYT story, which is a rather significant oversight. It treats the beginning of the war as if it were unclear who was responsible for escalating what had remained a largely frozen conflict. 5 Days of War is a bid to reinvent the story of the war for which Saakashvili bears a large share of responsibility in the hopes that an American audience will not know enough to realize that it is being deliberately deceived.

John Guardiano uses Obama’s election argument in support of Bachmann and Ryan:

In defense and foreign policy especially, the president often must make executive command decisions that only he can make. But the success of these “command decisions” depends far more upon ideological bearings and good judgment than it does upon “executive experience.”

Certainly, judgment is important. In spite of a decade of executive experience, Rick Perry has shown on many occasions that he has very poor judgment, and that should be taken into account. Nonetheless, at least his record as an executive gives us some idea of how Perry reaches decisions and how he might govern. When it comes to legislators as candidates, we’re mostly just guessing, which leads people on all sides to project their hopes and fears onto the candidate. One of the difficulties in assessing the quality of a legislator’s judgment is that there is often very little one can use other than the positions a legislator has taken in his career. They don’t tell us whether he has any of the managerial and administrative skills to which Guardiano refers, and they give us no idea how he would react in a crisis.

We know even less when a legislator has few notable achievements in his political career. No one can blame Bachmann for things that passed through Congress when she was a minority back-bencher, but that just underscores that her national career has been spent as a minority back-bencher. Sometimes what we find in a legislator’s record tells us all we need to know. If I’m assessing Ryan on the quality of his judgment based on what he has done in the House over his entire career, I would have to conclude that his judgment for most of the last decade was not very good, as he was complicit in some of the Bush administration’s worst and most fiscally irresponsible policies. If judgment and “ideological bearings” are what matter most, the conservative case for Ryan gets weaker, not stronger.

Relatively inexperienced candidates have to appeal to judgment and ideology, because that is what they have to offer. The appeal to judgment is the one that Obama used repeatedly to good effect. Because he didn’t have much of it, Obama belittled the importance of experience in the 2008 race. He cited Clinton and McCain’s poor judgments on Iraq as the reason why it was better to trust him. The judgment that Obama made in 2002 on the invasion of Iraq was the one and really the only thing that separated him meaningfully from the rest of the Democratic field, and it was the most important difference between him and McCain on foreign policy. His original opposition to the Iraq war didn’t reliably tell voters how he would judge other foreign policy issues in the U.S. Senate, it didn’t match up very well with the platform he would run on as the nominee in 2008, and it would have been extremely misleading to expect Obama’s presidential decisions to be guided by the same thinking that informed his 2002 antiwar speech. In the end, one of the main things that led many people to trust Obama’s judgment wasn’t very representative of how he would act once in office.

As for this “elite pundit” business, let me say a few things. Paul Ryan is being avidly promoted by a number of elite pundits and journalists, and the main reason we are even talking about him as a possible presidential candidate is that some party and movement elites are unhappy with the current field of candidates. Criticism of Ryan’s qualifications for the Presidency is a reaction to having a candidate foisted on us by said elites. Nothing could be more artificial than the “draft Ryan” push being encouraged by some party insiders, and nothing would please many elite conservative pundits more than a Paul Ryan presidential bid.

Guardiano is probably right that much of the mainstream disdain for Bachmann is informed by their hostility to Bachmann’s populist conservatism, but that isn’t what informs my view at all. She has generally voted the right way on the major legislation that has come before the House since she was elected in 2006, I have been pleasantly surprised by her opposition to the Libyan war, and I have generally taken her candidacy more seriouslyfrom the beginning than most, but that doesn’t mean that she’s qualified to be President. So far, I have not seen any persuasive argument explaining why she is.

Jonathan Bernstein sums up why he doesn’t take the Christie and Ryan boosterism seriously:

There’s just an enormous amount of grass-is-greener thinking going on here, sparked among other things by the length and, well, invisibility of most of the invisible primary.

This is related to what I was trying to say yesterday. If Ryan jumped in at the end of the month, there would be another round of calls for Christie to enter, and vice versa. If they both decided to run, it might not be long until the drumbeat started for Marco Rubio, or maybe Jindalmania would return after being dormant for several years. Before they enter, the would-be candidates’ flaws are minimized or ignored, or they are treated as the reason why they should be candidates (see Ryan and Medicare reform), and then after they jump in we hear many of the same people lamenting how unfortunate it is that the field is full of so many seriously flawed candidates.

The strange thing is that the desire to find better candidates lends itself to a desperate willingness to tolerate the entry of even weaker or more compromised candidates into the race. Republicans convinced that the party can and must provide a more compelling field of potential nominees seem to have a knack for choosing alternative candidates less viable than the ones they already have. The field is weak, and they demand that it be made even weaker.

Since many people seem intent on treating him as a potential presidential candidate, let’s look at some basic facts about Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan starts off as a relatively unknown Congressman from Wisconsin. Half of the public doesn’t know enough about him to have an opinion. When Bloomberg bothered including him in one of its national polls in June, he had a net negative favorability rating, and his proposal for Medicare reform was wildly unpopular. His favorability has dropped to 41% in his home state as well. He would be unlikely to carry his home state. While he clearly has some significant support among party and movement elites, he does not have much of an established fundraising network, and he would be up against several other formidable fundraisers in the current field. Probably the most effective argument against Obama that Republicans have is that Obama has not been a good executive, so it makes no sense to put forward as a candidate someone who has had exactly as much executive experience as Obama had before he was elected.

At its core, Ryanmania is based on the assumption that serious entitlement reform is popular, or at least that it would become popular if it were presented by the right person in the right way. Further, it takes for granted that pushing entitlement reform in the context of a presidential election will help the GOP win the next election. As Antle said earlier today, “I just don’t see anything in the last 30 years of American politics that should inspire this confidence.” The curious thing is that Ryan boosters are acting as if the GOP hadn’t just won its House majority partly by railing against the health care bill’s Medicare cuts. It was just last year that Republicans were demagoguing changes to Medicare with the best of them, and now many of them want to go before a less conservative general electorate with a Medicare-cutting reform advocate as their standard-bearer. Ryan would be wise to ignore them and stay where he is.

Ross responds to my earlier post on Chris Christie:

Given the gravity of that situation, for America and the world, and the growing weakness of the Democratic incumbent, is it really surprising that Republicans would look around for possible alternatives? And given that any alternative would need to enter the race with a splash and swiftly raise enough money to be competitive in the early primaries, is it really a “marvel” that the two Republican politicians who have raised their profiles dramatically during the last two years — Christie and Paul Ryan, that is — are the names that people keep coming up with?

No, it’s not surprising at all, but at this point it is unrealistic. Yes, I still marvel that a newly-elected governor and a fiveseven-term member of the House are the politicians that many Republicans name as would-be political deliverers. There’s no question that they have raised their profiles in recent years, but they have done so because they are in the midst of important policy fights in Trenton and Washington respectively. Christie is enjoying whatever success he is having because he presumably knows state issues and has crafted policies to address them. Ryan has gained national attention because of his work as a budget policy wonk. That experience is relevant, but it isn’t going to make it any easier for them to fill in all the gaps on policies that haven’t occupied their attention before now. Neither of them would run a campaign that is as aimless as the one Fred Thompson ran, but Christie and Ryan candidacies would suffer from the same basic flaw: they have no particular reason to run except that there is a vague feeling that all of the other competitors are unsatisfactory.

Jon Huntsman hasn’t gained any traction for many reasons, but it didn’t help that he had to throw together a campaign at the last minute after he returned from China. It would be even more difficult for Christie or Ryan to pull together an organization on such short notice. The organizational challenges for any candidate are considerable. Urging Christie or Ryan to get into the race at this point is to invite them to humiliate themselves. Of course, if Republicans want someone with Romney’s reputation for executive competence without quite so many egregious deviations from the party line, and if they find that they can’t abide Rick Perry’s brashness and policy blunders, Huntsman would seem to be an obvious alternative, but he was ruled unacceptable even before he entered the race.

As Ross and I understand, however, Huntsman’s candidacy is not going to gain much support, because he is too sensible on foreign policy for the hawks, and because he worked for the administration he would be trying to replace. It has not helped Huntsman that his candidacy was promoted so heavily by mainstream media outlets. The enthusiasm for Huntsman among some journalists is really just the mirror image of the conservative media’s longing for Ryan and Christie. While there is some constituency for a Ryan or a Christie candidacy, I suspect that conservative pundits and journalists are their main base of support.

Ross challenges critics of Christie and Ryan boosters to offer an alternative, but what I am saying is that there is no more time for an alternative to emerge. More to the point, both Christie and Ryan would disappoint their former boosters almost as soon as they entered, and in another few weeks we would be treated to a new round of columns calling for Jim DeMint or Sam Brownback (or whoever) to ride to the rescue. This brings us back to Bernstein’s observation that Republicans are stuck with the field they have, and the field they have is a reflection of the party. Whether or not it is the absolute best that the GOP can do, the field is now as good (or bad) as it going to get.