An unusual metabolism must propel Vivek Ramaswamy’s rapid-fire fluency during peripatetic campaigning. And something keeps him slender while not counting calories, as at last Sunday’s brunch of huevos rancheros followed by a hamburger topped with a fried egg.

The first Republican millennial – he is 37 – to run for president sees a path to the presidential nomination: Reach the top three in Iowa, the top two in New Hampshire, then zoooooom. This is not much more implausible than businessman Wendell Willkie was when he won the 1940 nomination after registering zero percent in polls three months before the Republican convention. About governing, Ramaswamy has the limitless optimism of the inexperienced. “Shutting down” the administrative state? Easy, he says, because much of it was created by rescindable executive orders. Returning the Federal Reserve to the single mandate of preserving the dollar as store of value? Statute be damned, the person he chooses to replace Chair Jerome H. Powell will acknowledge no other mandate.

Making Social Security and Medicare sustainable? Painless: Neither benefit cuts nor revenue increases needed because sustained 5 percent economic growth is attainable partly by “abandoning the climate cult, drilling more, fracking more, burning coal unapologetically.”

Abolishing the Education Department? A piece of cake, and without congressional involvement: Civil service rules protect individuals, so mass layoffs are possible by executive fiat. And impoundment – the presidential power to not spend appropriated money – should be revived.

Congress might not cheerfully bid adieu to the power of the purse, but Ramaswamy might have the most capacious conception of presidential power – institutional and pastoral – in this history of U.S. politics.

Although he describes today’s pandemic of wokeness as a disease – “a cultural cancer” – he also calls it a “symptom” of “a vacuum at the heart of our national soul.” Americans, he says, are suffering a “void of purpose.” This is an echo of 1979, when President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation about its supposed “crisis of confidence” striking “at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” Americans were, Carter sermonized, misunderstanding “human identity” and “longing for meaning.” Actually, they were longing for competent government, not a presidential scolding.

Ramaswamy sensibly deplores what he calls the “waterfall of political accountability” – authority cascading from Congress to administrative agencies that often work their wills by pressuring private entities. He thinks the Biden administration’s industrial policies – scattering subsidies like confetti – make corporation’s “effete,” flinching from competition. He is right about many such things, from the Fed’s mission creep to the merits of meritocracy.

Ramaswamy and his wife, Apoorva, are the meritocracy incarnate: its energy, intelligence, discipline and creativity. And its boundless confidence in the plasticity of things under the touch of people trained to master society’s messiness. He met his wife when, after Harvard, he was at Yale Law School and she, now a surgeon with 21 operations scheduled this week, was at Yale School of Medicine.

One of her husband’s rare misfortunes in a life of swift and stratospheric ascent is that the 45th president tarnished the recurring idea that the nation needs a president who thrived in the private sector and is innocent of political experience. Ramaswamy did not inherit wealth: His parents immigrated from India, settling in Cincinnati. He made hundreds of millions from biotech start-ups, and has published three books, so his preternatural confidence is understandable.

But unconvincing, considering the political challenges he must surmount before, he hopes, he will confront governance challenges, such as the war in Europe. Ramaswamy favors “major concessions” to Russia: ending support for Ukraine in exchange for Vladimir Putin’s pocketing another portion (beyond Crimea) of Ukraine and promising better behavior (regarding arms control and China).

Ramaswamy, who has not encountered many problems that are impervious to his charisma and certitude, believes that a forcefully expressed presidential vision can conquer Washington’s viscosity. When he has lived longer, he will know better.

He is less than half the age of the Republican front-runner, and if elected would be four years younger than John F. Kennedy was when, at 43, he became the youngest elected president. Ramaswamy’s is not a vanity candidacy: He is public spirited and wholesomely exasperated by what he correctly considers the unusual and unnecessary quantity of irrationality in public life today.

It is good that the political process is porous enough to be penetrated by an outsider who is a Roman candle of ideas, many of which merit a hearing. He might kindle a fire. Stranger things have happened. But not many.