The Republican Establishment won’t have House Speaker Paul Ryan to throw into the breach if their convention goes to hell three months from now in Cleveland. That’s what he said today, anyway.

“We have too much work to do in the House to allow this speculation to swirl or to have my motivations questioned. So let me be clear: I do not want, nor will I accept, the nomination for our party,” Ryan told a room brimming with reporters at the Republican National Committee’s Capitol Hill headquarters.

Hmm. He sounds like he means it, but he sounded like he meant it when he declined the Speakership after John Boehner resigned the job. I am not entirely ruling it out, particularly since to this point he has been unable to get his party to produce a budget by April 15 as required by law. He might decide he’d rather be President with more leverage against his Tea Party Freedom Caucus loonies than continue as Speaker and watch them ignore him.

What’s a Sherman? General William T. Sherman, one of the best Union generals the North had during the Civil War and the general who succeeded Grant as Commanding General of the Army in 1869, was continuously being importuned and pressed to enter politics (we’ve seen this with Generals Colin Powell and David Petraeus in our own time). In an interview with Harper’s Weekly in 1871 he said:

“I hereby state, and mean all I say, that I never have been and never will be a candidate for President; that if nominated by either party I should peremptorily decline; and even if unanimously elected I should decline to serve.”

100 years later it’s a tossup whether he’s more famous for his March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah in 1864 or for this statement.