LONELINESS is a potent force in politics. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me,” Ronald Reagan liked to say, recalling why he became a Republican in his 50s. This week it was the turn of Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to explain why he will retire from Congress at the next election in November. Mr Ryan, a former vice-presidential nominee, talked of his three teenage children and of his own father’s early death, and noted that if he served another term in Washington, his children “will only have known me as a weekend dad.” He was surely sincere. Visit Janesville, his hometown in the dairylands of southern Wisconsin, and even Democratic-voting neighbours attest to Mr Ryan’s love of family, whether escorting his brood to church or taking his daughter on a first deer hunt.
But Mr Ryan left unsaid the other way in which his Speakership leaves him painfully alone. Still only 48, he was the future of the Republican Party once: a...Continue reading
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