BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  MAY 3

It is mindboggling, isn’t it, this election year? It’s like an untethered hot air balloon caught up in a windstorm.

The atmosphere is a toxic mixture of ignorance and arrogance, fueled by anger, disillusionment, distrust, some big egos and a lot of cash.

Intelligent, civil, informative, unifying, discourse? Forgetaboutit.

It is the winter, spring, summer and fall of our discontent. It has grown worse over decades, of course, nurtured and fertilized by those skilled at exploiting human nature, magnifying emotions, monetizing and manipulating them for political gain and corporate profit.

There are two elements that deserve deeper thought, though. One is the anger underlying it all. Especially since the birth of the Tea Party, the anger has been treated too lightly, with too little deference to its depth. There is plenty of justification offered for the hostility, some legitimate, some not, but it is not to be denied or slighted. Those who opined for so long that it would all blow over were wrong. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but farther to the dark side.

Plato was said to observe 2500 years ago that “Anyone can become angry; that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way, that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.”

True political leaders would not exploit anger for their own benefit, nor would they channel it for destructive means. They would channel it into constructive purpose, rebuilding and restructuring the institutions of governance, restoring public trust in a manner that encourages or persuades politicians to behave differently. Not happening.

The second element is the fanatical focus on the presidency. More people probably know where Malia is going to college and what vegetables Michelle grows in her garden for grade schoolers than who their congressman is. The Executive is not the only branch of government. It is not even the first. Congress is. And while the President and Vice President are the only nationally-elected leaders in our Republic, their exalted celebrity status is undeserved. It is nonsensical. They are by no means supposed to be the most powerful or the most empowered under the constitution. There are elections across the country for the House and the Senate that are as consequential as that for the presidency and I would guess the average citizen couldn’t name one. Okay, two.

All that is the long route to Paul Ryan, the lanky kid from Wisconsin, who became the Speaker of the House in a tumultuous environment in which failure is more predictable than success.

Yet, from his perch overlooking the South Lawn of the Capitol, Ryan isn’t ducking for cover.

Over the past several months, he has framed three important responses to the campaign carnival. First, he has spoken eloquently and calmly about the critical need for the return to civil discourse in politics and the restoration of public faith in the political process.

On discourse and our treatment of one another:

“Our political discourse…did not used to be this bad and it does not have to be this way…when people distrust politics, they come to distrust institutions. They lose faith in their government, and the future, too.  We can acknowledge this. But we don’t have to accept It. And we cannot enable it either.”

Ryan also told young interns in Washington:

“  …Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations. Instead of playing to the identity politics of “our base” and “their base’, we unite people around ideas and principles…We don’t resort to scaring you, we dare to inspire you.” In a confident America, we also have a basic faith in one another. “

That went over well.

“Coward,” screamed the headline over Washington Post Columnist Dana Milbank’s condemnation of his speech on civility.

Some anonymous intellects writing on the Speaker’s web page were equally offended.

“How do you know when Ryan is lying? His lips are moving. Dirtbag.”

“Overpaid jackass,” huffed someone named Craig.

Second, Ryan decided not to stay silent on matters of public policy. He assembled task forces of members of Congress to focus on solutions to some of the major, critical issues facing the country:

• National Security
• Tax Reform
• Reducing Regulatory Burdens
• Health Care Reform
• Poverty, Opportunity, and Upward Mobility
• Restoring Constitutional Authority

But, the task forces on policy are not universally popular, either. Task force results can become as much a target for partisan criticism as a positive agenda for the next Congress. And, it’s a lot of work to create an agenda for a new Congress over which they may have no control, grumble some on the Hill.

Third, Ryan spent weeks making Shermanesque denials of interest in being considered a fallback presidential nominee. Finally, he had to resort to the only credible thing a politician could do today, book himself on a late-night comedy show where he could get his message across. In putting distance between him and the presidency, however Ryan was able to reinforce the seriousness of his commitment to restore the Speakership and the Congress to a greater position of prominence and productivity.  He could have more easily kept everyone guessing.

All of this seemingly counter-intuitive motion on his part makes one wonder whether he is slaying dragons or windmills.

The comedian George Goble once told Johnny Carson that he felt like the whole world was a tuxedo and he was a pair of brown shoes. Ryan wears brown shoes.

Ryan has a different point of view to be certain. He said recently that “politics today tends to drift toward personality contests, not policy contests. Insults get more ink than ideas. But we still owe it to the country to show what we would do if given a mandate from the people.”

He is making sense, reminding us what that “vision thing” is all about.

He is encouraging dialogue critical to restoring function, Plato’s form, and faith and productivity to Congress and, more broadly, our political process. He seems to be making a sincere effort to get people to think about solutions to their problems in a more substantive framework than what is being offered them on the campaign trail. Candidates are, understandably, intently focused on saving their job or securing a new one. They do that by squeezing down, miniaturizing and oversimplifying solutions so much the solutions don’t register with the brain, only the emotions.

Additionally, Ryan’s policy juggernaut holds out the hope that thoughtful ideas will elevate the discourse a little bit and transform the Neanderthals back into contemporary, civilized homo sapiens.

Ryan’s initiatives could, too, reinstate what used to be a respectable gap between campaigning and governance. For too long, there has been no discernible distinction between them. That gap– that timeout– is critical to the success of our political process, but politicians, the press and the public have let one simply consume the other, with campaigns that never end, with partisan politics that never subsides, with job security not just one motivation in behavior, but the only one, and with an obsessive, cancerous media that can’t stop eating away at the body politic.

If Ryan can restore the Speakership to its rightful place in the governing hierarchy, he will have achieved a great success. If he can begin now to bring the institutions of government, especially the Congress into the 21st Century as functional, effective and collaborative institutions, then the attention ought to be on him and not the center ring of the presidential circus. There is no need to wait until next year to achieve what should have been done a decade ago.

Related to the preeminence of the Speakership, Ryan may also want to give some thought to what kind of Speaker he wants to be if Republicans retain the majority in the House and he is re-elected.

He may face some critical choices. First, is he Speaker of the whole House, a constitutionally-enshrined officer, who is third in line to the Presidency? Or is he what most speakers before him have been, the leader of their party’s caucus in the House. It may well be a question with new dimensions in the next Congress with shrinkage in the margin between Democrats and Republicans and the control of the Senate may turn. In that case, fulfilling a national agenda and fulfilling a Republican agenda, may well come into conflict. Speaker Ryan doesn’t talk too much about the principle of majority rule, certainly not outside the context of partisan rule, but he may have to as the cold realities of this election cycle begin to set in with a desperate and intolerant citizenry come January.

Ryan deserves great credit for wondering outside the dots of partisan conventionalism and election-year hysteria.   But that has not come his way quite yet. So far it has only gotten him a primary opponent.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.