I’d laugh at the suggestion that Joe Scarborough might run for president except for the fact that he’s really no less plausible than Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Herman Freaking Cain. Don’t forget that Mitt Romney won despite not being a southerner, not having any charisma, and having created the model for ObamaCare. He won despite once having a pro-choice record, and despite having made promises to the LGBT community. He won despite being a Mormon in a Southern Baptist party.
For a long time, the Democrats correctly felt that they had little chance to win the presidency unless they ran a Southern candidate. The reverse is probably true for the Republicans at the moment. That doesn’t mean that the base of the party is clamoring for another moderate governor from a blue state, but they might be willing to settle for a northerner out of pure expediency.
Scarborough is in an unusual situation because he’s technically from Pensacola, Florida, but he’s been living and working in Manhattan for long enough to be a New Yorker. As an employee of the loathsome MSNBC, he has another strike against him. And he doesn’t have the foreign policy chops you’d hope to see in a presidential candidate, but then neither do any of the other widely talked about contenders.
He has media skills. He can think on his feet. He knows how to speak to blue America. He can probably raise a lot of money.
But I don’t think he is willing to be unorthodox enough to pull off a coup for moderates. To be successful at that, he’d have to win primaries in most of the blue states and then do well enough elsewhere against a divided opposition to grab the nomination. I don’t think a non-conservative can do that without breaking substantially from the GOP on a host of issues that would energize non-traditional Republicans. Is he willing to talk to young adults about climate change, protecting the environment, civil liberties, gay rights, and ending the Drug War? If he is, he might be able to carry New England and the Mid-Atlantic, and that would be a start.
Unfortunately for moderates, the GOP in places like Washington, Oregon, and California is so radical that moderates don’t have much of a chance. I guess I could check the primary rules in those states on a case-by-case basis, but Scarborough would not win any caucuses.
I’m tempted to argue that his campaign would do about as well as the campaigns of Rudy Giuliani and Jon Huntsman, but I think Scarborough could potentially do better than they did.
After all, consider the competition.
