The Other McCain

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CPAC 2023: Why Not This Guy?

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | Comments Off on CPAC 2023: Why Not This Guy?

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Vivek Ramaswamy is the longest of long shots among 2024 Republican presidential candidates, but anyone who knows me, knows I love an underdog. The official results of the 2010 midterms hadn’t been counted before I jumped aboard the “Cain Train,” backing Herman Cain’s 2012 campaign, which nobody gave a chance until, a few months and a few debates later, he zoomed to the top of the polls.

Ramaswamy’s speech yesterday at CPAC was lit, as the kids say. He is an outspoken and articulate critic of the religion of “Wokeism,” but more than that, is an enthusiastic proponent of American exceptionalism.

Having never paid any attention to him before, I knew nothing about this Hindu son of immigrants with the hard-to-spell name and, of course, being a brown guy named Ramaswamy is just one more disadvantage to his presidential prospects, but when you’re looking for dark horse candidates, you like ’em as dark as possible (no pun intended). Now let’s take a brief look at Ramaswamy’s bio:

Ramaswamy was born in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised there. His parents emigrated from Vadakkencherry, Palakkad, Kerala, India. His father graduated from a regional engineering college in Kerala and worked for General Electric as an engineer and patent attorney, while his mother graduated from Mysore Medical College and worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.

(You know who else worked for General Electric? Ronald Reagan.)

Ramaswamy graduated in 2003 from St. Xavier High School, a Jesuit high school in Cincinnati. He was his class valedictorian and a nationally ranked junior tennis player.
In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in biology. He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras. His thesis was awarded the Bowdoin Prize for Natural Sciences, and a precis was published in The New York Times and The Boston Globe in 2007. In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by the The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In 2013, he received a J.D. from Yale Law School.

(Uh . . . “Soros Fellowship”? He’s going to have to explain that, because certainly his opponents will try to make hay of that.)

In 2007, Ramaswamy and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network, a technology company that provided software and networking resources to university entrepreneurs. The company was acquired in 2009 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. From 2007 to 2014, Ramaswamy worked at QVT Financial, where he was a partner and co-managed the firm’s biotech portfolio while simultaneously attending Yale Law School from 2010 to 2013.
In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, which focuses on applying technology to drug development, serving as CEO until 2021. He appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development. . . .
Ramaswamy announced his candidacy on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight on February 21, 2023.

So the dark horse with the hard-to-spell name has a pretty impressive biography, and if Tucker Carlson is willing to host his campaign announcement, that suggests that I’m not alone in thinking this guy might just have a shot — a long shot, but a real one.

 



 

 

Category: CPAC, Election

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