REPUBLICANS 101---THE FIELD

It’s July of 2015, there are sixteen of them, and it doesn’t seem likely there will be any more---not serious contenders, anyway.  So it’s time to review the field and tell you who has a prayer, who doesn’t, and why.  Some of them can be dismissed with a sentence or two; others require a bit more analysis.

In alphabetic order:

Jeb Bush.  The guy with the most campaign cash, most organization and most endorsements by standard-brand Republican organizations.  Obviously, the guy who gets the nod from the bloated corpse (but the rich bloated corpse) of the mainstream Republican Party can get the nomination.  I mean, Bob Dole got the nomination, didn’t he?  Republicans can win in 2016, and it would be sad for many of us if Jeb Bush got the nomination because he is peculiarly ill-suited to beat Hillary.  Just as Mitt Romney was the one guy who couldn’t beat Obama in 2012 (because, with Romneycare on his resume, he couldn’t attack Obamacare), Bush is the one guy who can’t beat the dreadful Hillary.  He’s the only guy who can’t challenge her as a “legacy” candidate.

Also, there are those of us who think no mainstream Republican candidate will ever be elected again, that George W. was the last. The brand is broken, in other words.  I may be mistaken about that, of course, but Jeb is not the guy who will prove me wrong.

Ben Carson.  A truly brilliant man and a decent, God-fearing patriot with the values we need our next President to have.  He has no chance to become president, however, and not simply because he has no experience in politics.

There is a reason doctors don’t get elected to office very often and a reason we’ve never had a president with a medical degree.  They are not really democrats, and not really suited to a democratic form of government.  It’s not how they think, it’s not how they are trained, and it’s not how they behave.  Over the years, I have had a number of chats with doctors on politics or morals or philosophy, and the thing that often strikes me is how genuinely surprised they are that someone would disagree with them.  They’re not accustomed to it.  It doesn’t occur to them that there could be a valid objection to their point of view, at least not one from a non-physician.  I vividly recall one such conversation on the topic of abortion with a doctor who insisted that his medical expertise trumped any sort of moral issue I might raise.  Abortion was proper until the moment of birth and that’s all there was to it.

You can see hints of this attitude in Ben Carson.  He gets his back up instantly when he asked questions he doesn’t expect, and he refuses to answer them.

Chris Christie.   See Jeb Bush.  There is only room for one anointed mainstream Republican, and he isn’t it.  He is hoping Jeb will falter and all the juice and money will flow over to him, but even if Bush is rejected by the electorate, Christie wouldn’t be the choice.  Chris Christie is a regional phenomenon, and the further he gets from New Jersey, the more people say, “Wha…????”

Even as a vice-presidential candidate, he brings nothing to the party since he certainly can’t put New Jersey into the Republican column.  It’s hard to see why he is running and soon, he won’t be.       

Ted Cruz.   Just as Jeb Bush is the mainstream candidate, Cruz is the real conservative (as opposed to the candidates who are currently trying to sound like conservatives in order to curry favor with what they perceive as “the base”).  Cruz won’t go to Iowa and say ethanol subsidies are groovy, like Scott Walker did, and he will never support an increased minimum wage law, like Santorum does.  The attention and money he has attracted indicates that if 2016 is the year for a conservative, Ted Cruz will be the guy.

Carly Fiorina.   Girlfriend!  What the heck are you doing here?  Fiorina is one of the few I would actually vote for, and in a head-to-head debate, she would make Hillary cry like a little girl.  Unfortunately, we won’t have a chance to see that.

She is not out of the question as a vice-presidential pick, however, and that is why she is still running.

Lindsey Graham.  Another liberal lined up behind Bush, with no chance of breaking through.  As a sideshow, his status as a (presumed) closeted gay senator brings an oddly antiquated aura to his candidacy.  It’s also a bit creepy the way leftists (e.g., Jon Stewart) mock Graham for being gay---I thought that was supposed to be a good thing in 2015.

(Note: in Queer Studies departments across the academic world, the theory that Abraham Lincoln was gay seems to be losing its adherents.  James Buchanan, however, is widely viewed as “our first gay President.”)

Mike Huckabee.  In addition to the Good Old Boy Republicans and the Conservative Republicans, there are also the Evangelicals, and Huckabee may be at the top of that list.  In an election cycle where the issues are the moribund economy, the dangerous world Obama has left us, and the trashing of our rule of law, guys like Huckabee seem very much like voices from yesterday.

Bobby Jindal.  In horseracing, the horse with the best early speed can sometimes burst away from the pack and hang on to win wire to wire, so one of the worst bets at the track is the horse with the second-best early speed.  Being the second-best conservative candidate in a Republican primary puts you in a similar position.

John Kasich.  In Ohio, he embraced Obamacare and vastly expanded Medicaid, explaining that it would get him into heaven.  As a liberal behind Bush, he has little chance of getting the nomination, but he is given a good shot at being chosen as Bush’s running mate.  The idea is that if Bush can win his home state of Florida and Kasich can win Ohio, the Republican ticket is certain to win the general election.

Yep, that’s how they think.  Nothing about persuading the electorate, nothing about the country itself, nothing about the Constitution, nothing about the jihad and the slaughter of innocents, but if we can snag those 47 electoral votes, WE’RE A FREAKIN’ LOCK!!!!

George Pataki.    Why Pataki?  I don’t know.  He’s almost 70 years old and he always wanted to run for president, so now he is.  Blue state moderate Republicans have virtually no shot at the presidency, but, for some reason, that doesn’t stop them from running.  Sometimes they even get nominated.  Right, Mr. Romney?  Pataki cannot even make the VP argument, like Kasich can, since Hillary will NOT lose New York.  In fact, the Democrats could nominate a gorilla for president, and the gorilla would win New York.

Rand Paul.   Shortly after he announced, he was criticized for being short-tempered and prickly with a female reporter, and the theory advanced by the Left was that he didn’t like women.  But that’s not it.  Like Ben Carson, Rand is a doctor, which means that he’s right and you’re wrong.  He’s going to be prickly and short-tempered with anyone who pushes back at him.  Doctors just aren’t suited to democracy.

There’s another reason Rand can’t win, however, and that is the precarious state of the world.  Since Obama took office, the world has become so much more dangerous that even isolationist libertarian types recognize that certain butts will have to be kicked, and soon, in order to assert American power and values.  Somebody will have to tell Putin he can’t have the Baltics.  Somebody will have to tell ISIS that enslaving women and setting people on fire must stop.  Somebody will have to tell Iran they can’t have the bomb.  Rand Paul is not the guy to do that sort of hard work.  He is not the right man for the moment, and that is why his campaign is languishing.

Rick Perry.  About 10% of the stuff Donald Trump says is accurate and pithy and funny and true, and his observation about Rick Perry’s glasses is one of them.  Trump said that Perry now wears glasses so that people will think he’s smart.  Bingo.  Not only is he correct, but Rick Perry in glasses (black, thick-rimmed serious-looking things), looks exactly like a guy who is only wearing glasses because he is desperately trying to look smart.

Perry’s brain-freeze in the 2012 debate will never be forgotten.

Marco Rubio.  He’s way Hispanic and Latino and he sometimes says conservative things and the mainstream Republicans don’t want to trash him because they think he might be important someday, but I don’t see how his base voter differs markedly from Jeb Bush’s base voter.  He’s a Gang of Eight guy and he’s pro-amnesty just like Bush is, and he will shade his views in one way for a certain group of voters and then shade them another way for the next group.  If Jeb Bush is rejected by Republican primary voters (and he may be), Rubio steps into his shoes.  Otherwise, there is no path to the Presidential nomination for him.

(Note: Since both Bush and Rubio are from Florida, Rubio cannot be chosen as Bush’s Vice President.  If he were, under the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, their ticket could not be awarded the electoral votes from Florida.)

Rick Santorum.  See Huckabee.  It’s over, Rick.

Donald Trump.  He’s not a conservative, he’s not a Republican, and he’s not running for President.  Other than that, his chances to win the Republican primary are terrific.

When I say he’s not running for President, I mean just that.  He is doing nothing to qualify his campaign in the various states in which he has to run and he is doing nothing to organize his followers.  All Trump is doing here is polishing up his “brand,” which is something he now does more-or-less instinctively.  This “campaign” so far has cost him little, and will make him a more valuable commercial and reality-TV commodity.  He’s WAY bigger than Honey Boo Boo now.  Plus, he’s a blowhard and he likes attention, so now that he has caught some lightning in a bottle with his immigration issue, he will keep pounding it until it stops working.  And it will.

The idea that he is going to mount a third-party campaign using his own money is even more ridiculous.  Guys like Donald Trump do not go to the bank to make withdrawals, they go to make deposits.  He may be a jerk and an egomaniac, but he never loses sight of the bottom line.  He would never be so foolish as to throw hundreds of millions of his own dollars at a quixotic quest that cannot succeed.

Scott Walker.  We may not have saved the actual best for last (alphabetically), but he’s a different sort of candidate, and hard to categorize, and that makes him a threat to win.  Bush, Cruz, Rubio and Walker are the only ones with a realistic chance.

Normally, one would view Scott Walker as just another Chamber-of-Commerce, good- ol’-boy type of Republican, and slot him in somewhere south of Bush.  He has a history (that is now being discreetly hushed up) of supporting amnesty and a “path to citizenship.”  Also, there’s the new-found love of ethanol now that he’s campaigning in Iowa.  So he panders.  He’ll say what he has to.  He has a lot in common with Jeb, and Christie, and Romney.  These are not exactly evil men, but they represent the past, and none of them will ever be elected President.  I certainly won’t vote for one, and I won’t vote for Walker either.

Walker, however, is different.  Though we cannot know what he believes, and we can’t believe what he says, he apparently believes in something. And he can fight.  He beat the public sector unions in Wisconsin though every major union in the country threw millions into the battle to defeat him.  Then they tried to recall him, and that didn’t work.  Then they spent more millions to prevent him from being re-elected, and failed again.  And all this happened in Wisconsin, a place that has not chosen a Republican for President since Reagan in 1984.

Scott Walker cannot be counted out of any race he enters, including this one.

Copyright2015MichaelKubacki