Terry MacCaullife sure seems to be off to a good start in Virginia, at least when it comes to economic development:
Jerry Brown is holding a big fundraiser even though he’s got $25 million and he already won reelection. Gee, wonder what he’s planning? And unlike last time he probably won’t be considered a gadfly. I think he’s more than proven himself:
Hooray, go Terry!
Jerry Brown is IMHO too old and has too much historic California-hippie baggage. Deval Patrick is just plain boring.
I find Terry McAuliffe (on TV) to be the absolute essence of disingenuous politics, but so far as governor, he’s done about as well as I could possibly hope. He’d be an awful presidential candidate, though, IMO.
Jerry Brown is probably too old to be a plausible candidate.
Here’s another one who looks like she wants to get in:
Carly Fiorina:
If the economy is in the tank, Kasich is good enough to pound Hillary. I’ve always thought Christy has a glass jaw.
Two other candidates are Jeb Bush and Scott Walker (provided of course he can be elected governor of Wisconsin in 2014 :)).
As I’ve noted before, in order to win the Republican primary you have to either be crazy or simulate crazy. Romney did the latter, making shit up to an almost hallucinatory extent. But once you establish a per-requisite level of insanity, the base tends to choose the most serious candidate. So neuro-typicals like Huntsman don’t have a chance. But similarly, the weirdness of Bobby Jindal will have him passed over for someone more familiar in 2016. (In 2020 or 2024 I wouldn’t count him out.)
Of the 3 serious guys I mentioned, Scott Walker has the best chance. His hard line on unions along with the recall campaign means he has nothing to prove to the primary voting right wing lunatic brigade: they are his natural base. And he has all the midwestern jazz and adult persona that Kasich possesses.
But if Walker and Kasich explode or fizzle out, Jeb could be the most serious guy left standing. And I’m guessing that he has the connections and smarts to figure out some sort of red meat to toss at the rabid dogs. So I wouldn’t count him out.
In terms of experience and qualification the ordering starts with Kasich, ends with Walker and places Bush in between. In terms of odds of Republican nomination, the ordering reverses, with a clown car of empty suits trailing behind.
Speaking of Carly Fiorina, I doubt she will receive overwhelming support in Silicon Valley.
Two Words,
Rove
Cheney
Aren’t these Two somehow contractually required to serve anytime a Bush is in office?
Neo-conservatives (remember them?) have cause for celebration: their man John Bolton is running for President. He was the staunch Iraqi War supporter who was shunted off to a UN ambassadorship by GWBush, to get his inane militarism out of the inner circle. Match Bolton up with smiling Bill Kristol as Veep, and it would be a chickenhawk dream team.
The John Bolton PAC and the John Bolton Super-PAC are both doing brisk business. Given Bolton’s fundraising prowess we can expect plenty of ass smooches by his fellow Presidential GOP contestants.
In 2008, McCain was one of the few top-tier candidates among a series of mid-tier candidates. He had a reasonably conservative background and an attractive resume (long-time senator, military bona fides, etc.), but the base was still riding high on the batshittery of the Bush administration and wanted someone more willing to make neocon foreign policy pronouncements. It wasn’t going to be a Republican year anyway, given Bush’s approval ratings.
In 2012, Romney was the only mid-tier candidate among a series of low-tier candidates. The Republican primary was a running joke in which one flash-in-the-pan candidate after another (most hilariously, Herman Cain) would momentarily emerge as the not-Romney candidate and briefly lead the polls. This was an odd situation where the incumbent was quite weak, but there wasn’t any strong candidate on the Republican side to challenge him. Romney was a one-term government from a liberal state who had little charisma or connection with voters; as Saturday Night Live put it, “He looks like the bad guy in every blaxploitation movie.”
The point is that the 2008 and 2012 elections were more about the particular circumstances of those elections rather than a conclusive demonstration that the right-wing of the Republican party can’t get their candidate nominated. Still, my guess for the 2016 Republican candidate is Christie, if only by default. As for other candidates:
- Fiorina is a non-starter. she’s never held any public office, and her only experience is as a CEO, and she wasn’t even a particularly good one.
- Jindal is possibly stronger than he would otherwise appear, but he’s not viable either. He’s too young (he’ll be 45 in 2016) and lacks a national profile. I also think that his article about exorcism called, “Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare” may make him come off as too silly for a presidential candidate. Even if primary voters aren’t primarily (ha!) concerned with the general election, primary donors certainly have it in mind.
- Kasich looks good on paper. I don’t think he has that much of a national profile yet, but he has the right sort of resume and is the about the right age to run for president.
- Nobody likes McAuliffe.
- Jerry Brown will be 78 years old in 2016.
- Elizabeth Warren will have been a senator for less than three years on 2016, and that’s the sum total of her experience in government. (The comparisons with Obama aren’t apt. He ran as a post-partisan centrist, where Warren is strongly identified with liberal causes; Obama had served in state government before becoming a senator; and most importantly, Obama ran for election following a disastrous, unpopular president from his opponent’s party.)
Warren might make a good VP candidate, though.
Warren is the Steve Forbes of 2016. The point isn’t to win office. The point is to push her agenda and introduce some accountability into Wall Street. Unlike Steve, she’s probably smart enough to be qualified, though there are plenty of more experienced candidates.
Scott Walker deserves a mention. He will have to handle calls to release the papers relating to his prosecution: that presumably would require some sort of waiver.
No, but she was a particularly bad CEO. That’s got to count for something. Oh yes and she has a failed Senate run under her belt. Clearly America is hungry for change.
She’s angling for VP, got to be. A woman, fairly moderate. If a far right-winger wins the nomination, there’s your balancer right there.
Possibly. But recall that Fiorina regularly is included in lists of worst CEOs of all time. Here’s one from Portfolio.com: 19. Carly Fiorina
A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.
THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.
Separately, here’s a list of candidates with prerequisite experience, smarts and sanity. Horseraces aside.
Hillary Clinton
Joe Biden
Kasich
Jeb Bush
I’d include Scott Walker, but I’m frankly leery of a guy with such close ties to Club for Growth, an organization that embraces crackpot economics. The ability of Kasich and J Bush to simulate crazy is as yet untested though, to my knowledge. I see Pence has both Washington and gubernatorial experience, so he’s a contender (I don’t know enough about him though). Dean doesn’t have much DC experience, though I suppose heading the DNC might qualify in a way.
I don’t think lack of DC experience is a problem. It’s lack of management experience that is more damaging. Most of our Presidents have been outsiders with experience as an executive or at least VP.
I was also thinking about Bill Richardson, but when I looked him up to see if he had intentions for 2016 he was talking about John Kerry for 2016. Um, no. I can’t imagine any constituency for John Kerry.
Kerry and Al Gore are two other highly qualified candidates, electability considerations aside. I see from wikipedia that Richardson has some corruption issues.
adaher - people say that. But immersion in national policy issues is important. You can get that in various ways. But in the end reality matters. Tax cuts during times of prosperity don’t pay for themselves. Experts believe that the Keystone Pipeline issue is overemphasized - job creation is temporary, the effects on global warming are real (due to cost considerations) but not over-whelming. Sloganeering is necessary for winning elections but knowledge, cognition and skepticism are what matters in the executive office.
Other factors too; among them are interpersonal skills, coalition maintenance and ceremonial stuff. More. Still more. I don’t claim the managerial challenges of the Presidency are fully understood though.
Governors have an electability advantage as they have less of a voting record to attack. But all Senators have at least run a small office.
Right, but Forbes had hundreds of millions of dollars from the business he inherited, and he was running a vanity campaign focused on essentially one issue: the flat tax. Warren has two orders of magnitude less money and has a political day job, and her interests are broader financial reform. Her campaign could stoke interest in liberal financial reforms…or it could appease those interest in such reforms and allow a more conservative candidate to have stronger support than otherwise. (I don’t see Clinton, for example, doing much about the issue.)
That’s not the case at all. Anyone powerful and well-connected enough to become president is going to have at least some perfunctory board positions, but if you’re looking for executive or VP experience in a company:
- Obama: Nope.
- George W. Bush: Oil and baseball.
- Clinton: He became a professor after graduating law school, then quickly entered politics. I think he joined a law firm briefly when he lost re-election, then returned to office until becoming president.
- Bush: Yes, although he was in politics for quite a long time before becoming president.
- Reagan: I think he was made VP at one point during his stint on General Electric Theater, but it would be a stretch to say that he therefore had managerial experience. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild, but I don’t think managerial experience with a labor union is what you’re going for.
- Carter: No. Besides his work in government, he was a naval officer and ran his family’s farm.
- Ford: No, he started up a law firm and then was a Congressman for two and a half decades.
- Nixon: Early on, he worked as a lawyer (and was a partner in his practice; but again, that’s not really the sort of executive experience it sounds like you’re looking for). After the war, he went into politics full-time, though he did return to law between 1960 and 1968.
- Johnson: Except for spending a few years as a teacher and serving in WWII, Johnson was working for politicians or a politician himself throughout his life.
- Kennedy: Far too rich to have had a job, even a corporate VP sinecure.
- Eisenhower: He was president of Columbia for four or five years, but otherwise he was in the military his whole life. (Besides, for managerial or executive experience, being Supreme Allied Commander in Europe trumps anything in business.)
- Truman: He worked a variety of odd jobs before World War I, but I don’t think he was ever even management. He did famously start and run a haberdashery store for a couple of years, but it was far too small to have any sort of substantial executive staff, and it was failure anyway. After that, he was a machine politician, then senator, then president.
- Roosevelt: No, but he worked as a lawyer briefly before entering politics.
Based on that, I’d say that at least since the war, most presidents have been high-powered lawyers who entered politics and mostly avoided business altogether. The primary exceptions are Eisenhower, who was a national hero and had more than enough management experience during the war; and Reagan, who nevertheless served as governor of California for two terms before running for president. (You might also make an exception for Obama and Carter, given their thin political resumes, but their elections were more a matter of their deeply unpopular predecessors and the public’s wanting a genuine outsider.)
The only two presidents in the list with substantial business careers are George W. Bush, whose business career was hardly a wild success, and his father George H. W. Bush, who had been in politics for decades before being elected president in 1988. Continuing one president back in the list, Hoover was a bona fide businessman; he was a self-made millionaire and internationally recognized humanitarian who had never held elective office before becoming president (although he had served as Secretary of Commerce). His administration did not go well.
And after that long-ass post, I rerolled my reading comprehension check and realized that you were talking specifically about federal-level (as opposed to Washington as a synecdoche for government in general) offices and political experience. Sorry, must still be half-asleep from Thanksgiving.
That was a pretty good post though: there’s not a lot of evidence that skills transfer remarkably well from business to government. But I think adaher was considering a governorship to be a form of executive experience.
To take DeLong’s framework, the President works a 90 hour week and spends 30 hours on policy, 30 hours on coalition maintenance and 30 hours on ceremonial stuff. Washington experience helps with the all 3. A governorship helps partly the first (though not on foreign policy) and somewhat with the 2nd and 3rd. Most politicos can mostly handle the last with ease, though Nixon and Romney had their difficulties. Somebody like Palin or Rick Perry shouldn’t be doing the first, and GWBush frankly struggled with it (remember Katrina?).
Temperament also matters. GWBush couldn’t hold a decent meeting. McCain has subsequently proved himself to be a knee-jerk hawk. Notwithstanding his business background, Romney ran a poorly managed campaign: his GOTV program was a mess and his ad-buying was inefficient. Plus he surrounded himself with Iraqi war dead-enders, indicating a superficial grasp of policy. Reagan’s hands off managerial style served him and the nation poorly: for examples see the Iran/Contra scandal and the entire memoir of David Stockman, his budget guy. It is said that Democrats tend to micro-manage, but that’s simple bullshit: only Carter did that, and I’d chalk that up to his lack of DC experience: I suspect that smart governors from mid-population states do micro-manage with effectiveness.
Clinton micromanaged too, but he had the ability. From what I’ve read about Obama, he obsessively micromanages what he’s interested in while staying totally aloof from things he’s not. As if the government was like a series of college elective courses.