Ramaswamy Grabs the Mic

Plus: A Club for Growth VP eyes a Senate run in Virginia.

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Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the 2022 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in December 2002 in Phoenix. (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

Happy Monday! We’d like to extend a warm “welcome back” to self-help author and “spiritual thought leader” Marianne Williamson, who said Sunday that she will challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024. Last time around, Williamson didn’t make it to Iowa, but you never know—and it’s hard to imagine a more interesting general-election presidential debate than, say, Williamson vs. Ramaswamy. 

Up to Speed

  • Given his presidential star has risen during his term as Florida governor, Ron DeSantis hadn’t faced many questions about his foreign policy agenda until recently. Now, however, he appears to be allying himself with the GOP’s emergent isolationist wing. In a Fox News interview last week, DeSantis criticized President Joe Biden’s “blank check” approach to the war in Ukraine: “He’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything at home to secure our own border here at home.”  Those comments contrast sharply with ones DeSantis made while still in Congress—most notably when he criticized former President Barack Obama for not being hawkish enough against Russia’s encroachment on Ukraine. “As a conservative congressman, DeSantis, now a potential presidential hopeful, urged sending ‘defensive and offensive’ weapons to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 and even voted to refuse to fund a new missile defense treaty with Russia until they withdrew from Ukraine,” report CNN’s Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski.
  • Democratic Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin is officially running for retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s Senate seat. In a video released Monday morning, the former CIA analyst focused on her personal backstory and perceptions of national malaise: “We all know America is going through something right now. We seem to be living crisis to crisis,” she said. But “our country’s going to get through this. It’s hard work, but that’s what Michiganders do.” Slotkin enters what’s shaping up to be a slim Democratic field: Two other possible contenders, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, announced over the weekend they won’t get into the Senate race.
  • Slotkin’s announcement brings her 2022 Republican challenger, Michigan state Sen. Tom Barrett, one step closer to running for her House seat again in 2024. “Senator Barrett has received very strong encouragement from throughout Michigan to run for the 7th District and is putting together plans to do so,” Barrett said in a statement Monday morning.
  • The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) returns to the D.C. area this week, kicking off at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Maryland March 1-4 and featuring a host of speakers including former President Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Neither Ron DeSantis nor former Vice President Mike Pence are currently slated to attend. The conference has been somewhat overshadowed this year by an allegation of sexual assault against lobbyist Matt Schlapp, who runs CPAC’s parent organization, the American Conservative Union. Schlapp has denied the allegation in court. 

Can Ramaswamy Corner the ‘Anti-Woke’ Market?

If you’ve decided to run for president, there’s an art to deciding when to announce your candidacy. If you’re a former president yourself, you might want to be first out of the gate, to cast each subsequent entry as an explicit referendum on you. If you’re a former member of that president’s administration, you might wait for the field to expand and minimize the amount of time you have to spend going mano-a-mano with your former boss. If you’re a certain popular governor, you might want to finish up your legislative session first, both to pad your policy résumé and perhaps to make sure running won’t force you to resign from your current job. 

And if you’re a political newcomer whom even many new junkies haven’t heard of, you probably want to grab that microphone early before things get too noisy and crowded.

This seems to be the strategy for Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech founder who became the third Republican to officially enter the race last Tuesday. With a pile of other contenders still waiting in the wings, the 37-year-old megamillionaire is already off to the races, barnstorming across New Hampshire and Iowa last week.

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  1. Avatar photo
    JohnF

    At some point, someone should put together a job description for the POTUS and all of a candidate's policies should be measured against that job description and be based on whether they are something that a President should (or can) actually do. It's fine to like the "candidate who hates the same things I do", but it's also important to be pragmatic enough to recognize the limitations of the Presidency, while also taking into consideration that there is a job to be done that often doesn't have much to do with the domestic culture wars of the day.

    Assuming that conservatives still believe in small government and in the distribution of powers (and particularly in the desirability of putting decision-making about local issues in the hands of local authorities), we should be heaping disdain on some of the "issues" that some Presidential candidates are focused on. It's fine to be critical of corporate ESG programs, but do we really want the Federal government to regulate them? Or is that something better left to the market? Similarly, do we really want the Federal government dictating what is/is not taught in schools or what gets posted on social media sites?

    And ... with a Federal deficit of $1.4 TRILLION, assuming that the Federal Government actually spends anything on "drag queen story hours", is cutting that funding really a solution to anything that the POTUS should be working on?

    Instead, candidates should be forced to talk about foreign policy; trade and tariffs; national defense; interstate transportation, commerce, and the environment; foreign and domestic Intelligence; and the execution of federal laws and financial obligations.

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  2. Hikingguy

    This guy is just one more rich SOB who is trying to buy the government. He could not care less about anybody who is not a rich SOB. But do keep dreaming that this appeals to a majority of American voters.

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  3. Wsampson

    good to see the race to rule vs. govern continues. Act 1 - say the election was stolen then pass election restrictions to fix the problem you made up. Act 2 - woke. Don't know where y'all live, but here in Illinois, at work, school, and in the neighborhood it really doesn't exist. But voters are mostly ignorant, so enter the next flavor of grievance politics. As to the club for growth - so you hate paying taxes buy have millions to throw into politics? Yeah - that actually points to a real tax problem - they know they are under-taxed so taxes themselves must be the problem.

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  4. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    Ramaswamy should run for governor first. Enough of this straight to President nonsense. One of the reasons the Roman Republic started to break apart was rich people jumping straight to the top executive job instead of following the cursus honorum and working their way up the ladder. The top job requires experience, not just talent.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Sgrantsm

      Agree. The job is leading the executive branch of the federal government which includes being the Commader in Cheif and developing and executing foreign policy. Leading a pharmeceutical company that buys and sells subsidiary companies is nothing like leading the executive branch of a government because government is nothing like a private, profit-making business and can't be run like it's a business. And no CEO takes an oath to protect, preserve and defend the Constitution.

      Also, thanks for the Latin. Had to look it up!

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  5. Avatar photo
    Sgrantsm

    LUK: Ramaswaney's pitch sounds like he's going to ride the pure anti-Leftism hobby horse sure to please Republicans who are no longer a policy party. I didn't see any "specific policy proposals" in what you reported.

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    1. Trichwages

      Yeah, his candidate website is pretty soundbite heavy and specifics free, too.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Sgrantsm

        That's because of who he's appealing to, R primary voters. They LOVE sound bites. Can't get enough of them. Specifics? Nah. Thx for the info.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Sgrantsm

    How is climate change a social factor? It's a change in the habitat the natural world provides to humans, and that change could make our habitat inhabitable. I suppose it's social in that it will cause social disruption. Those at the bottom will be hurt first, while those at the top take off to other planets complements of Branson, Bezos and Musk.

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  7. Njonesburkett

    I don’t like Vivek. He’s just like Desantis except he’s not a sociopath. Same policies. All about culture and identity, grievance politics which is destroying the country. The only Republican I like in the whole GOP right now is Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. Most hard core fiscal con in the nation. She should run. She has big accomplishments under her belt as a tax cutter and deregulator, school choice, and she’s popular. You can’t not like her.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Sgrantsm

      First I've heard of her. Might she run?

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  8. Diane Hansen

    Put me down for a NO on Vivek……we’ve done outsider with no experience and it didn’t work out well.

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  9. Avatar photo
    Robert Knudson

    America probably deserved a reality star President and I guess America deserves a follymath as its President, so Ramaswamy can't be counted out.

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  10. Avatar photo
    Dave Conant - MO

    Vivek who?

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