Bush vs. Clinton in 2016, Because America is a Land of Opportunity
Via Instapundit comes this link to Ron Radosh's column about the push to draft former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for the the GOP presidential nomination in 2106:
I have no objections to Jeb Bush running for president. He obviously has a wide appeal as a potential candidate. … What I do object to is that Bush is already being heralded as the obvious candidate, the man to whom the big money must and will flow. As the Washington Post reports:
"Many of the Republican Party's most powerful insiders and financiers have begun a behind-the-scenes campaign to draft former Florida governor Jeb Bush into the 2016 presidential race, courting him and his intimates and starting talks on fundraising strategy."
Radosh goes on to note
As for the Democratic Party, its equivalents in the big-money community have anointed Hillary as their preferred candidate. Like Jeb Bush, she has not said she is going to run, but is already taking all the steps to have the money ready to flow and the organizations on the ground should she decide to take the step.
I'm less certain that either of the anointed will ever officially run but I share Radosh's antipathy toward a possible showdown between any Bush and any Clinton again in my lifetime (and I hope to live another 50 years). Though I don't share his reasons for fearing the match-up:
So we have the possibility of a Clinton nomination on the Democratic side and a Bush nomination on the Republican side, and the chance that in both parties, mavericks dissatisfied with that choice will favor an independent run of their own. For now, all bets are off, but a third-party run — either by a disenchanted Democrat or a conservative or libertarian Republican — always hurts the party they broke from and more likely ensures the political victory of a candidate they all disdain.
To me, the idea of a wide-open race, with several candidates representing more points on the political spectrum isn't a bad thing at all. It's simply a sign that the current parties no longer represent coherent groupings of allies. That's especially true, I think, on the Republican side, where the ostensible party of small government is generally supportive of all sorts of super-invasive incursions on the right to be left alone. This includes opposition to gay marriage, drug legalization, and immigration reform that relies heavily on fortified borders and an employment-verification system that will punish all of us for deigning to work in the good ol' Land of Opportunity. And then there is the spending side of the equation: the last time the GOP ran the whole federal government, we saw an explosion of spending and regulatory zeal that should provide confidence to no friend of limited government. Does anyone seriously believe that, with the possible exception of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), any of the leading Republican prospects won't be all about expanding the surveillance state and the military-industrial complex upon taking power?
The Dems of course, have their own problems. For all their interest in mandating this and that, they've failed to soothe their far-left wing and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is talking about a White House. On top of that, the economic policies of Barack Obama have been nothing short of a disaster and the only thing that's kept things from being even worse is that he managed to get a Republican House elected two years into his reign of error.
But I think Radosh has it wrong: That the two major parties can't control their voting blocs is simply a sign that they need to change their agendas if they want to command reliable numbers of votes.
Given the number of people who say they worry that the government has too much power, is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businessness, support gay marriage and drug legalization, and more, there's a clear path to creating a new socially tolerant, fiscally responsible agenda for a party that wants to Win the Future rather than just having its own members shaking their heads and mumbling "WTF."