Rotating Men of the Hour

I hope you won’t mind a little horse race commentary. According to a poll taken April 19-21 by Fox News, here are the current rankings of the Republican wannabees among likely Republican primary voters. The number represents the percentage of responders who said they supported the candidate.

Marco Rubio 13
Scott Walker 12
Rand Paul 10
Jeb Bush 9
Mike Huckabee 9
Ted Cruz 8
Ben Carson 6
Chris Christie 6
Donald Trump 5
John Kasich 2
Rick Perry 2
Bobby Jindal 1
Lindsey Graham 1
George Pataki 1
Rick Santorum 1
Carly Fiorina 1
Other (vol.) 1
None of the above (vol.) 3
Unsure 9

Just looking at the first ten, of this crew the ones who have picked up support from a month ago are Rubio, Paul, Christie, Trump and Kasich. Walker, Bush, Huckabee, Cruz and Carson have dropped.

Jamelle Bouie writes at Slate that Jeb is breaking fundraising records. He’s telling people that his super PAC, Right to Rise, has raised more money in its first 100 days than “any other Republican operation in modern history.” Yet this is not discouraging other potential candidates from running.

There are more candidates now then there were when Jeb announced his “shock and awe” fundraising offensive at the beginning of the year, which is to say that Bush has neither shocked nor awed his competition. Despite his fame and name recognition, he’s not a titan like his brother or a leviathan like the present-day Hillary Clinton, or even a minor member of the political pantheon like Clinton in 2007; instead, he’s one hopeful among many. And while he has loads of cash, his chances aren’t appreciably better than his competitors’. Indeed, they’re probably worse: If Jeb stands out from the pack, it’s because he’s a Bush. And the Bush name is unpopular. Dismally, terribly unpopular.

A few days ago Scott Walker appeared to be the GOP’s fair-haired boy, but inexplicably (to me, anyway) now the buzz is about Rubio.  The theory is that Rubio is the guy who could attract the Latino vote without alienating the teabaggers. Just two years ago Rubio’s political ambitions were supposed to be over, because he promoted and then backtracked on immigration reform and gulped water during the response to the 2013 SOTU. Now that seems forgotten.

We’ll see. I suspect we’ll be playing rotating front runner for awhile.

For all his thrashing around to get attention, Booby Jindal clearly is not going anywhere. And Rick Santorum clearly has missed his moment, if he ever had a moment.

12 thoughts on “Rotating Men of the Hour

  1. Jeb’s boast about his stacks of campaign money might just alienate voters. It’s not just whether it discourages other candidates from entering the race, and could be seen as a form of intimidation to prospective hopefuls. It also creates an equation where money equals victory and the will of the people falls by the wayside.
    Even if that equation is true of politics today it doesn’t seem like a wise strategy to be boasting on size of your war chest and the implication that money rules.
    Have you ever heard theories about people who jump to their deaths in burning high rise fires? One of those theories is that when placed is a situation with no viable options people will opt to maintain some control of the situation no matter how desperate the situation is.
    Maybe I’m off on a tangent again, but I remember the feeling I had for Meg Whitman and Rick Scott in their quest for political office.. Just buy the office, forget the people. Money counts, people don’t. So, If he Koch brothers want to buy Jeb the presidency they might meet with some resistance.

  2. Good, post , Swami. Maybe I am experiencing a taste of misplaced optimism this morning, but, somehow, I still have an ember of faith in the American people. Alternatively, of course, some internal survival mechanism has summoned up sufficient denial to allow me to follow the daily rounds. Either way, it’s springtime.

    I meant to finish a supportive note to Doug’s comment about receiving and handling spam and flak, but, having a little of the farmer left in me, I nodded off early. On the surface, it’s hard to imagine how people could oppose limits on the power of money in our current political equation. But, they do. It’s always easier to see how other people, especially people with whom we disagree, have gone astray.

    I have some right wing friends who seem convinced that they share a common cause with the titans of wealth. So, they support the Kochs and their ilk. They probably imagined that the could enjoy a beer with “Dubya” or a sarsaparilla with “Mittens,” and that along the course of the evening they would be recognized as kindred souls. It scarcely seems believable, but it is a widely held delusion. Our billionaires are evil and their billionaires have risen up against them. Maybe, I am addled by the mirror image of that occasionally, without the liquid refreshments, etc.

    Democracy is never pure, but it is always fragile, and of all the types of corruption that can threaten it, the power of money seems the most devastating and the most common. Our political system and our economic system seem to work best when they limit and balance each other. If the politics throttles the economy, we have a few lost years and then some reforms. But, if economics overcomes democracy there’s hell to pay. Economies naturally occur, Neanderthals probably had something of an economy, but democracy is a construct that needs care and maintenance. It is always a work in progress, even at its healthiest.

    “As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods.”

    Well, so much for the misplaced optimism.

  3. “If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.”

    And is suspect that Santayana was talking about older history – and not just 15 years ago when the MSM loved them some W, the dry-drunk they wanted to have a beer with, and not Gore, the smarter and better qualified one.

    And I’m not even going to talk about 2008 and 2012, when the GOP had its countless Clown Primaries.

    Oy, our MSM are fools.
    Rubio is an empty-suit, with an even emptier head.
    And it probably won’t be money that elects the next GOP President, but the fools in the MSM “Liberal,” my butt!!!

  4. You know in the circus, how the teeny little cardboard car pulls up into the middle of all the sawdust and sixteen clowns pile out, honking and tumbling? As I read that list of names, the mental image was inevitable.

  5. Jindal played it right and Santorum played it wrong..the Christians are more interested in going after the sodomites than the money changers and tax collectors.

    Leviticus 1 – Psalms 0 (insert dancing banana here)

  6. It doesn’t matter. Whoever gets the GOP nod might as well change his name to “Not Hillary” because that’s going to be the sum total of his campaign. It’s time for candidates to declare what they are for instead of who they are against.

  7. Who the hell knows with this crew, I can’t imagine any of those shmucks being president. Thinking as a republican I would think Walker has the best shot, Bush is a Bush, Christy is an asshole (wingers think he is liberal), Paul, Cruz, Huckabee, are kooks. The rest of them are running for FAUX news contracts. I think in the end it will be between Walker and the dark horse Kasich, Walker has some real ethics problems stemming from his days as a county manager though I’m sure the liberal media will be too busy trashing Hillary to get around to reporting on that. I found it instructive that last week as all the repulicants went to Vegas to kiss the ring of Israel’s shadow PM (shelly Adelson) the media was completely focused on a discredited Hillary scandal. It’s gonna be a long 20 months.

  8. I get a kick out of Rubio. He compares the possibility of him being elected to the presidency to that of Obama’s rise to the presidency. State legislator,one term Senator, and then the White House. A simple formula except Rubio doesn’t take into account all the intangibles that makes his comparison of parallels such a joke. Charisma?

    Rubio thinks he’s the little engine that could.

  9. Since (as Doug says) they are all going to have the same message how about they just play “musical chairs” and the winner gets to be the nominee. Seems like it’s all a game anyway.
    Perhaps the gods are laughing at us.

  10. Well, if I was a contender on that list and my name showed up anywhere below that of Donald Trump’s I think I would question whether or not I should be in the contest to begin with. And then I think I would question the overall intelligence of the American public as I applied some bottled in bond liquid salve to my ego.
    That’s like the ultimate diss to get creamed by the Donald. It has to hurt!

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