There’s no obvious downside to running for president and ‘losing,’ when ‘losing’ is as seductive as it is.
There’s no obvious downside to running for president and ‘losing,’ when ‘losing’ is as seductive as it is.
I first became aware of Vivek Ramaswamy at an event in 2021. Like Austen’s Mr. Wickham, he simpered, and smirked, and made love to us all, without ever having considered that we might notice. He was, he explained through his TED-style headset microphone, so profoundly worried about the rise of wokeness in America that he had decided to leave his lucrative job and work on the issue full time. There was, he insisted more than once, nothing in this for him. This was an all-hands-on-deck moment that required personal sacrifice and the suspension of ambition. If the audience wanted to grasp just how bad things had become, it should read his new book, available at all good bookstores for $27.99 plus tax.
Two years later, Ramaswamy is still sacrificing himself for the cause. To help us all fight against those dastardly progressive threats, he has launched an anti-woke ETF, with an expense ratio four times higher than its nearest competitor. He has bravely launched a podcast to which you ought to subscribe; “political consultants told me launching a podcast is a major campaign liability,” he tweeted last week, but “we’re doing it anyway.” Oh, and he’s running for president, too. Not since the burning of William Tyndale have we been blessed by self-abnegation on this scale.
Rhetorically, Ramaswamy cuts an odd figure. He’s clearly highly intelligent, and yet his decision to download and internalize all of the cheapest 2021-era MAGA-at-the-bar mood affiliations gives him the air of a smarmy, opportunistic automaton. Like Mitt Romney, Ramaswamy speaks conservatism as a second language, and like Mitt Romney, he doesn’t quite know it. In his mind, he’s Laurence Olivier; in reality, he’s the understudy who was called in a little too early in the rehearsal process. His sentences scan and his timing computes, but, keenly aware that the audience may know his part better than he does, he surveys the room nervously for signs of affirmation and adjusts on the fly when he sees a frown.
The upshot of which is that Ramaswamy manages to say everything and nothing all at once. Announcing his run in the Wall Street Journal, he suggested that, “to put America first, we need to rediscover what America is. That’s why I am running for president.” Asked by Hugh Hewitt why running for president was “more important than the work you were doing,” he proposed inexplicably that it wasn’t, before launching into a delusional description of his role of the sort that would have made even Neil deGrasse Tyson blush in shame. “The question at the heart of our nation right now is what it means to be an American,” Ramaswamy said. “We lack a good answer to that question.” “We’re looking,” he added, “for somebody that can provide the ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago.” And that someone, apparently, is him. “You know what?” he continued. “I think I’m going to be able.” To make matters worse, Ramaswamy went on to describe the present absence of his ridiculous Messianic vision as “a missing gap in the conservative movement.” Supposedly, this was all preferable to normal Republicans, who “recite slogans they memorized in 1980.”
It’s all guff, of course — and it always will be all guff, because Ramaswamy isn’t really running for president. He hasn’t really given up his job; he’s transitioned into another one. He’s not really thinking about what it means to be an American; he’s building a ginormous mailing list. He’s not really selling “a vision that I have personally developed”; he’s running as Donald Trump’s obsequious press secretary. That’s an “as,” not a “to be.” As a candidate, Ramaswamy is not running to be Donald Trump’s press secretary; he is running as Donald Trump’s press secretary. We continue to live in a golden age of firsts, and, by his own remarkable initiative, Vivek Ramaswamy seems set to become the first contender for president in American history whose approach to the race is to sell the virtues of the front-runner better than the front-runner can himself. “I’m not running against President Trump,” Ramaswamy said recently. Nor does he expect to take him on. “I don’t particularly expect that [Trump’s] going to be taking aim at me that’s not respectful,” he predicted. “I’d be surprised if he came that way with me just because we’re friends. I think we have a deep, mutual respect for one another.” Well, yeah. It would, indeed, be “surprising” if Donald Trump were to attack his own valet.
For the better part of two decades, the incentive structures underneath our national politics have been hopelessly upside down, and nowhere has this been more acute than in the realm of presidential primaries. There is, it now seems, no obvious downside to running for president and “losing,” when “losing” is as seductive as it is. Given the size of the market and the breadth of the coverage, even our no-hopers are guaranteed by their mere participation to gain bigger contracts on the radio, larger advances on their books, higher speaking fees on the road, and a great deal more besides. It was inevitable that, at some point, a talented entrepreneur would come along and truly industrialize the process, and so it has come to pass. Ramaswamy 2024: Buy the book, the ETF, and the imminent show on Fox Business — weekdays at 7 p.m. ET.