Sean Hannity is not jumping on the Paul Ryan bandwagon.
The talk-show host who inadvertently helped torpedo Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House speaker told USA TODAY on Monday that Ryan “is probably one of the nicest men you’ll ever meet, but I don’t think that’s the job for him.”
Hannity said Ryan has previously told him he doesn’t want the job because it would take him away from his family. And the commentator is urging conservatives to look elsewhere for a speaker who will promise to aggressively challenge the White House.
Many Republicans have appealed to Ryan to run for speaker after McCarthy abruptly dropped out of the race last week, in part because of a disastrous interview on Hannity’s show on Fox News the day after he announced his bid to replace retiring Speaker John Boehner. During the Sept. 29 interview, Hannity pressed McCarthy on what House Republicans had done to earn the trust of conservatives. The majority leader volunteered, “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
Conservatives were outraged because the comment suggested that the Benghazi committee was a political tactic, not a serious effort to get to the bottom of the terror attack on the U.S. compound on Sept. 11, 2012. About three dozen members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus refused to back McCarthy’s bid for speaker. He withdrew from the race Thursday, leaving the party with no front-runner for the post.
“I thought it was way overblown,” Hannity said in an interview Monday. “I thought that it may be inarticulate, the comment that he made, but Benghazi should have been looked at ... this warrants an investigation on every level.”
Hannity also doesn’t think the Benghazi comment was really the thing that did McCarthy in. “I think he would have had a tough time regardless,” Hannity said, because of his close ties to Boehner, who lost the confidence of the conservative wing of the party. “The fact that Democrats jumped on him for political purposes anyway, that’s fine ... I don’t think this was the final nail in the coffin.”
Hannity says he has been advising Freedom Caucus members to stick together and not compromise on the speaker vote. “You ended up getting rid of Boehner, you ended up getting rid of McCarthy ... the dumbest thing you should do is stop there. Get the speaker that you want — work to get somebody that will fight the fight that you are looking to engage in,” he said.
Whoever becomes speaker — Hannity suggests former speaker Newt Gingrich, but both men say that is highly unlikely — will have to grapple with the restive Freedom Caucus, and it is clear the caucus members will have one of the top-rated cable news shows on its side. “The Freedom Caucus to me is trying to revitalize the Republican party and get it to be in Reagan’s words, not pale pastels but bold colored difference,” said the talk-show host, who is not a Republican but registered with New York’s Conservative Party. “John Boehner I think was far too willing to marginalize them and that is not going to be acceptable with a new speaker.”
Nielsen reports that Hannity's program draws 1.7 million viewers, ranking him among the top 5 cable news programs.