Why the GOP 2016 race needs Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham is running for president!

Don't laugh.

I mean, he won't become the Republican Party's 2016 nominee, much less win the presidency or even the vice presidency of the United States. But he knows that.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Lindsey Graham is of an increasingly rare breed: a true parliamentarian. Famously, he is a lifelong bachelor who basically has no life outside Congress. But unlike so many political lifers, he actually tries to pass legislation.

He's a man of actual conviction: A true conservative, he's also not afraid to buck his party, and wants to work with the other side on issues where they can get along. He first became notorious by being the lone Republican in the House Judiciary Committee to give a break to Bill Clinton during the impeachment process; remember, he was elected as part of the 1994 Gingrich Revolution. He is also an advocate of immigration reform. He once said that the way to fix Washington is less talking and more drinking.

And that is why he is running for president. Equally famously, he is tremendously invested in national security and foreign policy issues, and has been working on them since he got to the Senate over a decade ago.

Graham is an über-hawk. You might like that, or you might not. But the simple fact of the matter is that the soul of the Republican Party is up for grabs, on foreign policy as well as on other issues.

And the one thing everyone can agree on is that the world is a mess right now. Iraq is a mess — and no one is quite sure what to do about it. Syria is a mess — and no one is quite sure what to do about it. Russia is grabbing Ukraine — and no one is quite sure what to do about it. It's becoming increasingly clear that the Obama Administration is being hoodwinked by Iran which is using its talks with the U.S. to buy time in its gallop for the bomb. The less said about Libya the better. We've had eight years of a Bush Administration with a bad strategy, followed by eight years of an Obama Administration with no strategy.

Two things seem abundantly clear to me: The hawk's impulse to want to hit every nail with the single hammer of military force is not a foreign policy strategy; at the same time, it seems clear that the Obama Administration's accommodative posture to all comers really has emboldened tyrants from Moscow to Tehran, and that sometimes, yes, you do need force to deal with serious enemies.

In other words, what the Republican Party needs right now is a big, hairy debate on foreign policy. Rand Paul wants to shake things up, although how is not clear. Marco Rubio has staked out a strongly neoconservative position as a defining point. As candidates like Scott Walker bone up on foreign policy, and as Jeb Bush fleshes out his vision, they might stake out some form of middle ground between dovish and hawkish extremes. Lindsey Graham belongs in this discussion, and the Republican Party will be better off for it.

And finally, Graham belongs in this campaign simply because he is endearing. He doesn't have much charisma, but that's the point. He is not in the race because he is a monarch (King Jeb), or because he is a self-aggrandizing gasbag (take your pick). He is there because he actually cares about this stuff. And he has the temerity to believe that by just talking about what he believes in, he might shake things up.

I hope the process proves him right.