Ramaswamentum is a product of Bored Journalist Syndrome. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

12 - 15 minutes

The 2016 Republican Party presidential primary was one of the craziest, most thrilling political stories of my career.

Yet zooming out, it actually seems kind of boring. Donald Trump started out with high name recognition and a high level of support, and he maintained that high level of support, gradually gaining from multiple directions until he locked up the primary. Now of course the real story was more complicated than “the frontrunner won,” but that’s still basically what happened. Similarly, even though there was a crazy swing in the 2020 Democratic Party between New Hampshire and South Carolina, that was a very brief period in a very long campaign, the story of which was essentially “Joe Biden has been ahead the whole time.”

By the same token, I think the current surge of interest in Vivek Ramaswamy’s candidacy — like the earlier surge of RFK Jr. coverage — bears all the hallmarks of what I call Bored Journalist Syndrome.

American political journalists write articles about American politics, ideally articles that people will read.

“Trump is still ahead” is not an article that people will read.

In the online attention economy, you don’t really have the luxury of being dull. And while most journalists aren’t generally making stuff up or printing wildly misleading articles just for the sake of attention, they’ve got to come up with something. And right now, Ramaswamy is definitely something. He’s getting up to 10% in national polling averages and occasionally challenging Ron DeSantis for second place. This has positioned him for an upward spiral of attention leading to name recognition leading to higher polls leading to more journalism explaining his growing appeal, before it likely all just ends with the reality that most Republicans like Trump.

Note that just because an article is fundamentally motivated by boredom doesn’t mean that it’s bad.

When Bobby Jr. was having his moment in the sun, I took the opportunity to write a piece about vaccine policy, which is an important issue that doesn’t often feel urgent, and I was glad Kennedy inspired me to take a crack at it. I also uncorked this long, meandering piece about assassination conspiracy theories that’s really about the lost promise of a solidaristic alternative to identity politics. That idea is very important to me — I saw the trailer for the Bayard Rustin biopic this week, which reminded me of his work in that regard, even though (or perhaps because) it’s not a theme that’s featured in the trailer. When the movie actually comes out, you can expect to see me use it as an opportunity to talk about what I think is interesting about Rustin’s thought, even if that turns out not to be what the filmmakers are interested in.

In that vein, what I find most interesting about Ramaswamy is the extent to which he’s copying Pete Buttigieg’s strategy from 2020.

The two have some superficial similarities as Harvard guys of roughly the same age. But like the much older Kennedy, they both campaigned largely by doing national media hits, including plenty of fairly obscure podcasts and YouTube shows, and bootstrapping from those shows onto bigger ones. For example, even before Buttigieg’s star-making CNN town hall, he was a guest on the live episode of The Weeds we recorded at South By Southwest. A whole bunch of candidates were in Austin that weekend and we tried to book all of them. Buttigieg and Castro were the two who said yes, and I think that was a smart strategy.

Amy Klobuchar, like Nikki Haley this year, was pursuing a more traditional strategy focused on retail politics in an early primary state. The hope was that retail and local media could deliver a strong performance there, which would deliver more attention.

I think that strategy doesn’t really make sense anymore. When the news was delivered to your house via radio waves or trucks full of paper, geographically defined niches were very important. But today, whether you’re talking about audio or video or text, you are increasingly likely to get that information over the internet, which means geography is arbitrary. There are still niches, though, in small shows that are happy to book obscure candidates or weird outsiders. Showing up is no guarantee of success — you need to come across as at least somewhat smart, personable, and charismatic — but if you cross that threshold, the odds are good that someone will like what you’re saying. And that’s really the name of the game at this point. Josh Barro has a funny negative take on Ramaswamy’s personality, and Maya wrote her earnest negative take on Ramaswamy’s policy positions, but when it comes to “gaining momentum” in a presidential primary, it’s fine if most people hate you.

A wide-open presidential nomination process is supposed to be more democratic than power brokers in smoke-filled backrooms.

In practice, though, the lack of formal structure gives a lot of de facto power to the whims of the media. Most Democratic Party primary voters back in 2020 probably gave real consideration to the question of Joe Biden vs. Elizabeth Warren vs. Bernie Sanders. Some of those people made the considered choice that they wanted Bernie. A smaller number made the considered choice that they wanted Warren. And the largest number made the considered choice that they preferred Biden.

But I doubt many Biden voters spent much time pondering the choice of Joe Biden vs. Steve Bullock or John Hickenlooper. I think for all the reasons that you’d prefer Biden over Warren and Sanders, you’d also prefer Bullock over Warren and Sanders. Meanwhile, Democrats would be better off today if they had an incumbent running for re-election who was born in 1966 rather than 1942, and I don’t think “Joe Biden will get older with each passing year” was some unforeseeable situation back during that primary. The choice simply didn’t arise in a meaningful way. If you were concerned about electability, comfortable with Biden’s style of politics, a fan of Barack Obama, and generally speaking a mainstream Democrat, you just went for Biden — for most voters, there was never a moment of seriously weighing the choice. The closest we got was Biden vs. Buttigieg. But Buttigieg had a real problem with Black voters, and the mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana did not strike a lot of people as a safe bet in the same way that a former vice president was. The pairwise comparison with Bullock — a veteran politician who’s a quarter century younger — is less favorable to Biden, but it never happened because Bullock just never got attention.

And that’s the Ramaswamentum that’s happening at the moment.

A political nobody starts outpolling Chris Christie and suddenly that’s “a story,” even if he’s eleventy-million points behind Trump. So people start seeing the story — hey, this is a guy! — and suddenly the mere fact that a candidate is being discussed elevates him above the field, where he gets even more hype and more attention. The problem (for the candidate) is that these cycles tend to be self-limiting.

It’s a cliché to talk about presidential primaries in terms of lanes, but I’d say this GOP field has four of them.

One lane, the biggest and most important, is the “literally be Donald Trump” lane, and that lane is occupied by Donald Trump.

Then there’s the pre-Trump lane represented by Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott, all of whom basically want the GOP to more closely resemble what it was before the 2016 primary cycle. That’s distinct from the anti-Trump lane where Christie is trying (and succeeding!) to get attention with a “Donald Trump is a seriously bad person” message that, while accurate, just does not resonate with many Republican voters. Then, last but not least, you have Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis in the post-Trump lane. This is the lane that most current Republican Party politicians exist in. They believe that they have learned some valuable lessons about American politics and public policy from Trump’s success and that they can blend those lessons with their greater intelligence or skills or experience or discipline and be more effective than Trump ever was.

This is, I think, a pretty reasonable idea, and if Biden gets re-elected, we’ll probably see a formidable post-Trump nominee in 2028. The problem in 2024 is that we’re not post-Trump. Trump is standing right there.

If Trump were deeply committed to the America First Agenda, he might decide that he’s got a lot of baggage and he’s pretty old, and so instead of running for president, he might dedicate his time to fundraising for America First think tanks and fleshing out the MAGA policy agenda while letting a younger generation carry forward the torch. But Trump wants to win. So most Republicans ask themselves “how do I feel about Trump?” Most of them feel good about Trump, and most of the people who feel good about Trump just want to vote for actual, literal Donald Trump. The post-Trump play is a decent expected value in the sense that Trump might die suddenly of a heart attack and then it really is a post-Trump party. But absent the heart attack, DeSantis is drawing dead and Ramaswamy is at best running for vice president.

That said, running for VP isn’t a crazy idea. Trump would be a lame duck from the moment of his inauguration, and his vice president would have a clear leg up for the 2028 nomination. So even though there is something stupid about this whole thing, it’s not quite as stupid as it seems.

I was often frustrated by the 2020 Democratic primary because everyone seemed obsessed with disagreements that couldn’t possibly make any difference. Do you remember the argument about whether Buttigieg’s “Medicare for All Who Want It” proposal was left-wing enough or Bernie and Warren arguing about rival visions of a multi-trillion tax increase to pay for single-payer health care? There was a whole news cycle devoted to activists complaining that Beto O’Rourke’s $3.5 trillion climate investment package was too timid because he didn’t pledge to achieve net zero by 2030.

By contrast, the GOP primary field seems to have been completely de-contented.

The closest thing to a real forward-looking policy argument we saw at the debate last week was candidates circling around the idea of federal abortion bans. But all they were really doing was arguing over how pessimistic they should be about the congressional politics of a 12- or 15-week ban. They didn’t get into things the president actually has control over, like judicial nominations or FDA regulation of mifepristone. Nikki Haley criticized the CARES Act, which was interesting, but she didn’t really explain why, and nobody else on stage really criticized it. But that would be a topic to argue about: was Trump wrong to do fiscal stimulus? I get the sense that Republicans think nuclear energy is good. Do they have policy ideas about it? Why did the previous two GOP administrations not accomplish anything on this front despite impeccable pro-nuclear vibes?

Meanwhile, the moderators didn’t really ask anything at all about the present-day fiscal situation. If they’re not cutting Social Security or Medicare, what are they cutting? Medicaid, presumably, but how deeply? Do they still want to repeal the ACA? Extending the Trump tax cuts would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt — do they want more tax cuts over and beyond that? Nobody knows! Nobody cares! However it is that the conservative movement transacts their business, it doesn’t involve public media discussion of policy priorities.

Ramaswamy does a good job of filling that void by tossing out ideas that don’t make sense.

Midway through my first draft of this piece, he tweeted that college admissions should be based on a blend of the SAT and the Presidential Fitness Test and he didn’t really say why. But in saying so, he positioned himself as on the side of both meritocracy and personal fitness, which I guess is good vibes. He says we should lay off 90% of the Fed staff without giving any indication of who he has in mind (security guards? bank regulators? the people who make sure checks clear?) or why he thinks that’s a good idea. But he has anti-Fed vibes, combining longstanding Paul family vibes with current-day discontent with inflation. He says we should stabilize the dollar by pegging it to the value of commodities, which would very clearly make it less stable, not more. But no one in the field says anything about any of this; instead they argue about whether he loves Israel enough.

I find it pretty distressing that this is the level of discourse we’re on. But trying to actually answer these questions would be contrary to the spirit of covering a candidate out of sheer boredom. And GOP primary voters and conservative stakeholders don’t seem to care. So is Ramaswamy dumb? Is he saying things he knows are dumb? We’ll probably never find out.