Lindsey Graham is in:
Not sure where his niche is in this race, but I’m a fan.
Oh joy! Huckleberry J. Butchmeup joins the already-crowded field.
Ed Kilgore says, “a campaign trail with Lindsay Graham on it would guarantee Rand Paul a very regular pounding on foreign policy issues,” to which a commenter (not me, alas!) responded, “Mr. Kilgore, I realize this is puerile, but putting “Lindsay Graham”, “Rand Paul” and “a very regular pounding” in the same thought is wrong on more levels than I can describe. Well played, sir.”
And the proper response to “_____ is running for the GOP Presidential nomination” continues to be “Well, who in the damn galaxy ain’t?” There are more GOP candidates than YoSaffBridge had husbands.
Sean Trende at RCP has opined that with so many top tier Republicans in the race, it will be very hard for any one to win a majority of delegates. You figure the winner in Iowa will need only 20% or so, and a different guy will probably win NH, and still a different guy might win SC. Again with maybe 20% of the vote.
A brokered GOP convention involving the party as fractured as it is now would be entertaining, that’s for sure.
And remember, Joe Scarborough has expressed an interest in running too, so we’ve got more coming to the party. Rick Snyder and Mike Pence also want in.
Eagerly awaiting the entrance of Bob Dole into the race.
Ooh…Morning Joke is thinking of jumping in? I can only imagine what the pack of primary jackals is going to make of the dead intern…
And it’s going to take more than Viagra to get Dole jumping at this point.
As delicious as the prospect of a brokered Republican convention descending into fisticuffs and swordplay on the floor might be, it simply isn’t going to happen. The Iowa straw poll will cull the field later this year. After the Iowa caucus, all but no more than 3 or 4 will drop out. After NH, it will be at most a 3 man race. After SC, no more than 2 survive. The party will quickly coalesce around the heir apparent and it will be over before April.
Ed Kilgore has a nice bit of commentary on Trende’s piece. Concluding line: “It almost certainly won’t happen, I believe. But the odds are higher than at any time I can remember.”
Come to think of it, the 1976 Republican convention was the last major-party national nominating convention where the candidate was not already picked before it started. I’m pretty sure.
Well, Romney is back out.
I’m so glad he’s not running.
Mitt Romney is not running.
That really limits the field. Or not.
Romney finally said something the American people wanted to hear. Good for him.
So Mitt’s decided to drop out and go back to his car elevator.
Well, that opens up a bigger chunk of the field for “small-time businessman” Jebbie, who had also just picked off a key Romney operative from Mitt’s last two campaigns.
We’ll see if he can do anything with that.
I just saw where polls show that 48% of polled Republicans are in favor of something being done about global warming. Let the squirming and spinning commence. I wonder if the RNC will ask Inhofe to STFU.
Unfortunately, their solution includes tax cuts and more guns.
You forgot ‘praying’.
Kilgore (again) points out the following from the poll results:
Bolding mine. Maybe half of Republicans think something should be done about global warming, but it isn’t that important to most of that half.
And since the moneymen of the GOP are in the ‘do nothing about global warming’ camp and deeply care about it, backing that up with their ample checkbooks, nothing’s any different in the GOP on this issue than it was yesterday.
Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money had a great summary of why he thinks Mitt threw in the towel:
I think there might be something to that. Other than (only briefly) Rick Perry, the alternatives to Romney weren’t a crew that anyone, even the GOP base, could take that seriously.
This time, whatever you think of Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, the Rick Perry reboot, Scott Walker, etc., it’s a tougher field than Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain, etc., and this time, Romney wouldn’t have been entering the race as the default choice.
Maybe he could have won, but it would have been a lot more of a challenge than in 2012, which wasn’t supposed to be any sort of challenge at all, but it wound up being one anyway. He’d have had to get a lot more down-and-dirty to win this time, and he might well have failed to do so, which would have been embarrassing. So best to just go back home to his car elevator.
Now we know what went down in Utah. Step one for Jeb.
excellent, I love seeing him on the Daily Show and Jon Stewart’s impersonations of him.