For you or me that would be plausible. Who wants the aggravation? But people who seek political office are different and they rarely choose to leave the arena as long as they still think they can fight.
looking back at everyone saying Christie is funny ha, ha
I say Jeb Bush falls right in line with a couple of million other voters tired of saying anything just to get elected.
Jeb Bush for President
After Dubya left office, in disgrace and contempt, Jeb told a Spanish-language reporter who asked him what the future holds for him: * “No tengo futuro.”*
He was right.
I guess it depends: are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and things like unemployment insurance economic issues? I would regard them as such. And the GOP will cheerfully block-grant and privatize them all until they’re too small to be of much use. Then they’ll kill them altogether.
And the word is that a Clinton campaign team is gradually assembling.
Which is just the opposite of what’s happening with Jeb Bush, btw. Every indication is that he hasn’t started going through any of the motions of readying a 2016 run.
This is a very different race on the GOP side in 2016 than it was in 2012. 2012 looked like this: on the GOP establishment side, you had Mitt, but on the wingnut side, you had a freakshow of candidates who didn’t look credible even to the wingnuts. Trump, Palin, Bachmann, Newt, the pizza guy whose name I can’t remember, Santorum…eventually they went with Santorum, but that was desperation more than anything.
My rule of thumb is that even the wingnuts want someone who at least looks like he could play a President on TV. The more conservative side of the 2012 field failed that test pretty much across the board.
Regardless of what we might think of Cruz and Rand Paul and Paul Ryan and Scott Walker, my estimation is that all of these guys clear that bar with the wingnuts. Meanwhile, there’s something of a vacuum on the establishment end of things. No Christie, no Rubio, no Bob McDonnell, and probably no Jeb.
This is both true and silly at the same time, because it means very different things with respect to the two parties.
Let’s use an example: as you say, Obama’s not one of the exceptions. So when he proposed near-universal health insurance, he did it in a way that gave the insurance sector as much as it took away. But it’s providing health insurance for millions of Americans who didn’t used to have it.
The Republicans, who are also not one of the exceptions, fought even that corporate-friendly proposal every inch of the way, and are still actively working to undermine it. And they’d like to go further - to block-grant Medicaid and to voucherize Medicare.
So just lumping the two parties together on economic issues, as you have, papers over a Grand Canyon-sized gap between the two parties in that area. Yes, Wall Street jerks both parties’ chains. No, it’s not the same thing.
Agreed, the Republican response to economic safety nets is to dismantle them … motivates the poor, donchaknow. And the elderly, if they’re too old to work and they haven’t been able to save up enough money, they SHOULD die. Few Republicans/conservatives/libertarians are dumb enough to voice these sentiments out loud, but you can tell from their actions that that’s what they’re thinking.
But building strong safety nets, while a good and useful thing to do in terms of the economic health of our society, does nothing to address the issue of wealth inequality that is strangling our nation economically and destroying our democracy. We need a strong, informed, educated middle class that votes its own interests to challenge the power of the wealthy oligarchs, and so long as the rich continue to absorb all the wealth, that becomes less and less likely.
I think the “Bush” name lost a lot of political currency ever since Dubya got us into an unnecessary war and let the greedy pigs in the banking industry totally fuck over the economy. I can see the Democratic campaign ads already: “Do we REALLY want another Bush in the White House?” overrun with headlines about the economy crashing and Americans dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s guilt by association, granted, but it will damn sure work.
Does anyone think Romney will run again? I’m starting to see stories that appear to be attempts to make him more likeable, or something.
Those stories are due to the recent release of the documentary film about his campaign. No, no way he’s trying again, not after two failures. No loser since Dewey has been renominated; they’re now thought to have the contagious and incurable disease of Loserness.
what about Nixon?
Not consecutive but still renominated and actually won
I agree 2016 will be a very different race. Most Republicans knew 2012 was pretty hopeless - running against an incumbent is really difficult. And nobody wanted to run and lose and poison their chances for 2016.
So you had Romney, who was the legacy candidate from 2008 - he had to run because he was “due”. And all the others were longshot fringe candidates who were able to make a showing because the more mainstream candidates sat it out.