Vivek Ramaswamy Is A More Interesting 2024 Candidate Than Nikki Haley
I’m comparing the two because both have floated, at least, their names as potential 2024 presidential hopefuls. Haley actually announced her candidacy this morning…
It’s a nice video. A little cutesy, and maybe a bit too sunny to take her seriously, but it’s pretty well done as campaign announcement videos go.
Haley is likable, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see her get some traction. But the problem Haley has is she comes off as somebody you make a cabinet secretary rather than president. As governor of South Carolina she did a lot of the easy things well, but how willing she was to do hard things was a bit of an issue.
We don’t dislike her. We wouldn’t be disgusted if she was the GOP nominee in 2024, though we’d be gobsmacked to see the stars align that way.
But Nikki Haley’s a talented politician and frankly she’s got far more on the ball than anybody the Democrats could run. That doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll win, though – she needs a lot sharper and more compelling message than what’s in that video.
Ramaswamy, though, is actually a whole lot more interesting. Don’t freak out if you’ve never heard of him, he’s absolutely brilliant and he gets what’s tearing America apart. He isn’t in the race, at least not yet, but he is thinking about it…
Conservative author and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is “seriously considering” a 2024 presidential bid after traveling to Iowa in January, he confirmed to the Daily Caller on Monday.
Ramaswamy spoke with Iowa farmers and Republican leaders about reviving national identity and combatting woke ideology, the subject of his bestseller “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” published in 2021.
“I would say I’m seriously considering it, that’s where I’m at,” Ramaswamy told the Caller in a brief interview. He believes “we are in the middle of this national identity crisis” because “the things that used to define American national identity have disappeared.”
Ramaswamy views the rise of “secular religions” such as woke ideology as “a symptom of a deeper hunger for purpose and meaning.” He fears the search for meaning is holding America back from “taking on Communist China” and addressing other national challenges.
Ramaswamy’s vision is based on answering the question of “what it means to be an American,” and he will not be influenced by other candidates, he told the Caller.
“I’m interested in the question of the ‘what’ and the ‘why,’” he said. Based on conversations from his two book tours, he believes most Americans share his vision of renewing national identity.
Ramaswamy told POLITICO that he’d run on battling China economically, firing “managerial” government employees, shutting down many federal agencies, reforming the national security state and fighting affirmative action. What that boils down to is two things the 2024 election absolutely, positively has to be about – first, reclaiming competence and American meritocracy from identitarianism and the woke “diversity” fetish which has taken over so many of our institutions, and second, decentralizing power – cultural, political and economic – from the small number of hands it’s been placed in.
Here’s Ramaswamy from a month ago speaking to a Turning Point USA conference. This is so good it’ll blow you away. It’s a full frontal, devastating assault on woke tyranny.
We’re not going to tell you Ramaswamy would be a major candidate in the 2024 race. As of right now we only see two viable potential candidates – namely, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. As of right now, DeSantis isn’t a candidate, and before he does get in he’s going to have to get Florida law changed so that he can hold onto his office as the state’s governor while running; under current law he’d have to resign if he got in the 2024 race, and he certainly isn’t going to do that.
Which hasn’t stopped Trump from trashing DeSantis nonstop, something we’re increasingly irritated by. All it does is alienate Republican voters who like both of them, and it makes Trump look petty and insecure to attack DeSantis when he needs to be making the case nonstop that Joe Biden and the Democrat Party is actively ruining America and turning us into a woke dystopia with a defunct military, busted culture, dead economy and a broken supply chain. That’s Trump’s job. He’s a salesman; he should be assuming the close among his voting base. Instead he’s trying to resurrect the 2016 campaign with DeSantis as Ted Cruz, and it’s unlikely to work as well.
On the other hand, here’s the truth about Haley and Ramaswamy and some of the other 2024 long-shot entries, like Maryland governor Larry Hogan or Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson or former national security adviser John Bolton – the more of them get into the GOP primary race, the more certain it is that Trump wins the nomination.
Why? Because while DeSantis likely beats Trump in a head-to-head race for the nomination, as several (though not all) polls seem to show, Trump gets a plurality when there’s a full field he can run against. All of these long-shot GOP entries peel off a few points here and there, and they’ll peel those votes from DeSantis, not Trump. Trump has a rock-solid base of voters who won’t leave him, and while that doesn’t appear to be more than half the GOP (he’ll certainly poll above 50 percent in GOP primaries in the right circumstances, but in other circumstances he’s more like 30-40 percent), it’s enough to run first in a field of five or more candidates.
We’d like to see Ramaswamy go back to Ohio and run for the Senate seat Sherrod Brown currently holds, because we think he could win and win big. But if nothing else, he’d be an amazing cabinet secretary in a Trump or DeSantis administration. He’s fantastic.
