Some Guy .............. ?! ..... !!!!! :
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ryan-trump-summit-1463008193" The Ryan-Trump Summit
Thursday’s summit could be the beginning of a useful, if not beautiful, relationship. "
By
Daniel Henninger
" Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are the two leaders in the Republican Party’s Cold War. Which one is the U.S. and the other the Soviet Union is beside the point. What matters is that Republican Party factions—once again—are on the nuclear brink. On Thursday the two men will hold a summit meeting at a neutral site, with the Republican National Committee headquarters serving as Reykjavik.
Mr. Ryan has said he isn’t ready to endorse Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump replied that if the Speaker can’t support him, so what?
Suffice to say that before now, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that a party platform of mutually assured destruction was a strategy for winning the presidency.
Anyone who went through the U.S. education system before it fell apart is familiar with the saying: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The man who said that was talking about the human compulsion to repeat national nightmares.
Stepping back from a nightmarish brink is precisely what House Republicans did mere months ago, when they elected Mr. Ryan as House Speaker. Some seem to have forgotten what a corrosive, destructive and potentially self-annihilating mess that was for the Republicans. And here they go again.
Last September, under siege from the most conservative members of the Republican House Conference, John Boehner announced his intention to resign as Speaker.
His presumptive successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, abruptly ended his candidacy to succeed Mr. Boehner, and House Republicans descended into chaos.
The House’s 40 or so conservatives, the Freedom Caucus, seemed unappeasable. Insults and threats of retribution were rife. The White House and indeed pretty much everyone mocked the Republicans as ungovernable and incapable of governing.
Faction is inevitable in politics, and America’s Founders understood that faction was among the greatest threats to their government. Last fall, the Republican Party was there, at the precipice.
Instead, these factions agreed that Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin should stand for Speaker, in the virtually unanimous belief that he was the only person who could—if you’ll excuse the word—“unify” the party.
The ascension of Paul Ryan then didn’t have that much to do with what Mr. Trump referred to as the Speaker’s “agenda,” but with Mr. Ryan’s credibility as an honest broker. Policy differences aside, Mr. Ryan since that bloodbath has been the party’s one identifiable political anchor.
The unity in the House held even during the presidential primaries and debates, when the party’s 700 presidential candidates were insulting each other into oblivion.
The Ryan-Trump summit will be watched for one thing: to see if the Republicans intend to secure the presidency as a party divided, or as reasonably united.
Mr. Trump has suggested he’s willing to run with the party divided. A disunified party is a dangerous course, from the top of the ticket and across the GOP ballot.
Republicans have been called to public account already for their inability to govern, and the public’s greatest doubt about Mr. Trump is whether he indeed could govern the U.S.
In negotiating the treacherous politics of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump should not underestimate the minefield his old sparring partner Ted Cruz created with the government shutdown in 2013. Nerves were rubbed raw in the Senate and House, and the Ryan speakership last October was the salve.
Sarah Palin’s threat to “primary” Mr. Ryan reopens these wounds and revives the recent images—for voters and donors—of a party that is genetically ungovernable. The moment has arrived to reduce faction, not foment it.
The current narrative holds that the Ryan agenda and the Trump candidacy are irreconcilable, especially on immigration and trade. At bottom, though, I think both men want the same thing.
Donald Trump has the better way of putting it: Make America Great Again. Paul Ryan’s version, the one that runs back to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, is: Restore economic growth.
Donald Trump and Paul Ryan should use Thursday’s meeting as the start of a conversation on restoring economic growth. Both men understand that Barack Obama’s seven years of zero to 2% growth is killing the American public.
Reversing that Obama economic legacy is essentially the only thing Paul Ryan thinks about. It is the reality that has made Donald Trump the party’s presumptive nominee.
The differences on trade and immigration matter. But even here both men recognize that horrible growth has made productive thought on either subject virtually impossible. And both know that if growth doesn’t get better, whoever wins in November will be a one-term president.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party’s two leading figures, have given up on growth and now propose to anesthetize the American people to the Obama reality with the narcotic of “free” handouts.
Neither the entrepreneur businessman nor the Reaganite Speaker is ready to throw in the towel. Thursday’s summit could be the beginning of a useful, if not beautiful, relationship. "
Pages: 
The New and Improved Joey? thread (Read 2,104,626 times)
