House Speaker Paul Ryan: I Won’t Rule Out Accepting GOP Nomination At Contested Convention [VIDEO]

CNBC reports:



House Speaker Paul Ryan decided not to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, but he declined to rule out accepting it if a deadlocked party convention turns to him this summer.

“You know, I haven’t given any thought to this stuff,” Ryan said Tuesday night in an exclusive interview at the Capitol. “People say, ‘What about the contested convention?’ I say, well, there are a lot of people running for president. We’ll see. Who knows.”

Ryan, who ran in 2012 as Mitt Romney’s vice presidential nominee, has taken no public actions to encourage the idea that he could become a candidate. To the contrary, a political committee set up to draft him into the 2016 race recently shut down at the urging of the speaker’s aides.

“I actually think you should run for president if you’re going to be president, if you want to be president,” Ryan said in the interview. “I’m not running for president. I made that decision, consciously, not to.”