The Hill doesn’t really go out on a limb when they endeavor to tell us the 13 most likely Republicans to win the party’s nomination and then become our next president.
Sometimes I think that the Democrats and Republicans are so dissimilar that they just behave differently and you can’t take lessons from the one and apply then to the other. But we can’t go back to 1988 to see what the Democrats did when faced with the end of the presidency of a transformative world historical figure. They had just endured two electoral drubbings far worse than what the GOP underwent in 2008 and 2012, but they were also coming off of a successful midterm election in 1986 in which they regained complete control of Congress. They opted to nominate a governor of a very liberal state, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. In other words, the party still wanted to impose its will rather than adapt. Remember that when you read this:
“Don’t count the Ohio twins [Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rob Portman] out for vice president,” one strategist said.
“Kasich is a little too flakey, he’s still Kasich the congressman to a lot of people, and generally speaking, the politics of Ohio are a little too left of center for a lot of Republicans,” said another. “But guys like him bring an awful lot to the debate.”
The so-called “Ohio twins” are completely discounted as presidential material, but they might make it on the ticket despite being too left-of-center for the party base.
Will the Republicans, just like the Democrats of the late-1980’s, require a third drubbing before they come to the conclusion that the party cannot compete in national elections unless it widens its geographical appeal?
My guess is that the answer is ‘yes,’ because, if anything, the Republicans are slower learners than the Democrats.
For The Hill, the top tier challengers are Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Chris Christie. These are rather insane choices, although not obviously worse than lunatics like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee.
Trying to cram another Bush down the Republicans’ throats, let alone the country’s, seems like a thankless and expensive and ultimately doomed enterprise.
Chris Christie has more skeletons than a Halloween Party and a volatile and abrasive personality that is just as scary.
Rand Paul is a serial plagiarist with more family ties to white supremacists than Reinhard Heydrich and “evolving” positions on foreign policy that would split the GOP in half, if not quarters.
Nominating any of these men would be a recipe for epic failure, although Jeb probably has the temperament to keep things from getting into Goldwater/McGovern/Mondale territory.
Nominating a lesser known, less damaged governor, hopefully with some moderate credentials and a non-southern base would be the obvious play, and the equivalent of what the Dems successfully did in 1992. Scott Walker lacks the personality and Mike Pence lacks the moderation. The obvious choice is Kasich, but maybe not until 2020.
