Sen. Lindsey Graham wants to run for president. Why? I don't know and neither do you, but it would be irresponsible not to speculate that it is perhaps because Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham secretly swapped brains as part of a surreptitious attempt to get John McCain in the White House after all. (Hey, it's still not as stupid a theory as "a decades-long secret plot by Kenya.") The two men are surprisingly interchangeable, and Lindsey Graham has continued to rise in prominence of late almost entirely because there is not enough John McCain to go around, on the Sunday news shows, necessitating the need for Backup John McCain to make all the show appearances regular John McCain was unavailable for.
Graham, however, won't settle for merely being the John McCain figure in this presidential play. No sir, he plans to play the role of The Ronald Reagan Himself.
The South Carolina Republican, who recently won a third Senate term, makes no bones about fashioning himself in the mold of Ronald Reagan. In a statement on the committee website, Graham cited Reagan’s “peace through strength” policy for keeping America safe throughout the Cold War.
“But we will never enjoy peaceful co-existence with radical Islam because its followers are committed to destroying us and our way of life,” Graham said. “However, America can have ‘Security through Strength’ and I will continue to lead in that critical fight.”
Which makes sense, because Radical Islam is the new Cold War, and they hate us for our freedoms, and insert every other thirty year old cliche here while you're at it.
Let's just get this out of the way right now: Sen. Lindsey Graham has no particular shot at becoming an American president. He has no base of admiring supporters, he has no history of being so tremendously right on anything that the party simply must listen to him, and I am putting that nicely, and no billionaire backers insisting that he and he alone is the right man for the job. He also has the on-stage charisma of a bowl of lukewarm cereal. Despite his status as old-guard party stalwart in the mold of (shadow of) John McCain, the McCain-Graham wing of the party has struggled mightily to retain recognition in any American venue that does not sport its own green room, and has spent the recent years engaged primarily not in a battle against their Democratic foes but against the Ted Cruz-led segment of their party that insists on running around the floor of the Capitol climbing on the furniture and shredding the drapes. As presidential timber, Lindsey Graham will be lucky to achieve the campaign momentum of Jon Huntsman.
I suppose we did need someone who would stand up on stage and say "Ronald Reagan" a lot, though, and none of the other potential candidates have really stepped up to the plate on that. All right, Lindsey, you're in—for now. But I'd better hear a lot about what Ronald Reagan would do.