The potential best of what was once a Grand Old Party was on display for all the world to see Tuesday night.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is not running for president or vice president but wants you to know he is running the remnants of the Republican Party back in Washington, was the only politician on the TV set in yet another CNN town hall-style broadcast, in a town called New York City. And for most of the night, Ryan was adept at showing you the face of what could be your future government at its most hopeful and reasonable best.
“I think all of us, as leaders, have an obligation to do what we can to unify the people of this country,” Ryan told host Jake Tapper. “And we can’t just talk unification. We have to act towards unification. I do think our politics have been pretty poisoned. I think our politics have been bad in Washington and around the country and that we are impugning people’s motives and that we are saying if you work with the other side of the aisle, that if you reach across the aisle to have a good idea sometime, you are a betrayer, a traitor.”
“I think we have to go back to making politics a contest of ideas, start talking about principles and solutions. And I think just doing that can elevate the tone of our debate so we can actually start solving some problems in this country.”
But just days earlier, Washington insiders saw Ryan hasn’t abandoned the hardball-throwing tactics that for too long have been the way games get played in the nation’s capital. Ryan sent a letter asking Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to “refrain from providing any classified information” to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “for the duration of her candidacy for president.”
Ryan said he was asking this because FBI Director James Comey had said the former secretary of state had been “extremely careless” with classified information on her personal email server even though the FBI wasn’t recommending she be indicted. Ryan wanted the traditional classified intelligence briefings to be sent only to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The speaker wrote to Clapper that “it would send the wrong signal to all those charged with safeguarding our nation’s secrets if you choose to provide her with access to this information despite the FBI’s findings. I firmly believe this is necessary to reassure the public that our nation’s secrets are secure.”
Clapper promptly rejected the House speaker’s political ploy, replying that he won’t withhold briefings from “any officially nominated, eligible candidate.” Clapper added: “Nominees for president and vice president receive these briefings by virtue of their status as candidates, and do not require separate security clearances. … Briefings for the candidates will be provided on an even-handed nonpartisan basis.”
After watching the nicer, friendlier, bipartisan problem-solving face Ryan carefully turned toward CNN’s cameras, you understandably might have concluded the speaker must have just jettisoned his old hardball ways for good — and that from now on he’d be looking forward to reaching a friendly hand across the aisle in the spirit of good governance.
Understandable, but unfortunately if you thought that, you are wrong. Even as Ryan was speaking so optimistically to the TV cameras, the Washington Post was putting the finishing touches to an op-ed column by Paul Ryan. “Clinton is unfit to handle classified information,” said the headline above the speaker’s column. Ryan began by noting that Clapper had rejected him — so he has mounted a public campaign to pressure the intelligence chief to “reconsider.”
Ryan wrote that Clinton’s actions “do not seem careless at all. … Clinton’s actions seem quite careful — careful to place her own interests before our national security.”
Speaker Ryan may be just the sort of down-and-dirty partner Trump has been seeking.
