Many people seem to have taken Paul Ryan’s historically ignorant, ideological foreign policy speech as evidence that he may be considering a run for President. Michael Barone practically begs him to commit political suicide rise to the occasion, and in his recent conversation with Ryan urged the Budget Committee chairman to read Paul Rahe’s plea. Rahe is deadly serious that Ryan has a “duty to serve,” and he explains why:

Ryan is something different. He has attained a stature that no Congressman in my lifetime has achieved. When I cast my mind back in the past in search of comparable figures, I can come up with only two – James Madison in the First Federal Congress, and Henry Clay, when he was Speaker of the House. There were no doubt others, but the list is not long, and I doubt whether there would be anyone on it who served in the last hundred years.

This might be overstating things just a tad. Before we can say that he has attained such great stature, won’t he have to get one of his plans passed and signed into law first? Many profiles of Ryan mention that Jack Kemp was his mentor. Wouldn’t it help if he had a legislative accomplishment to his name that is at least as significant as anything Kemp did? If Ryan is one of the greatest members of Congress since Madison and Clay, it might be worth remembering that Clay didn’t win the presidential election he contested, and Madison’s turn as chief executive was somewhere between mediocre and an unmitigated disaster. Based on the dangerous, ideological foreign policy Ryan outlined in his speech, a Ryan Presidency would certainly have the potential for the latter. That said, a Ryan Presidency is not in the cards, and all of the people saying otherwise have been doing him an enormous disservice.

Update: Jonathan Bernstein comments on the idea of a Ryan bid:

Political scientists usually argue that issues and candidate are usually not all that important as fundamentals such as economic performance. But Ryancare is a different matter altogether: Nominating Ryan would make the election an argument over the GOP’s least popular policy proposal, instead of a referendum on the economy, which would be the GOP’s best chance of winning.