Jeb Bush for President?

[nosborne48]

Apparently he has decided to go for it in 2016.

Chance of winning? Good. Maybe very good especially if the Democrats run Hillary Clinton.

Well, pundits? Fire away!

[SteveFoerster]

I'm looking forward to the seemingly inevitable contest between Chelsea Clinton Mezvinsky and Jenna Bush Hager in 2024.

[Jimmy]

Jeb was Governor when the 2000 Florida debacle occurred. Although I was glad Bush was declared the winner, I don't find it coincidental his brother was Governor and he ended up winning.

Right now, my picks for the GOP are Mitt Romney, Carly Fiorina, and John Kasich. Should a Tea Party crazy end up with the nomination, I will vote third party or Democratic depending on the nominees. As of this writing, I like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in those roles.

[Roald]

Interesting. A Bush/Rubio ticket could go a long way towards securing FL for the GOP.

The question, as always, is can Bush get the nomination without pandering to Teapartiers and rendering himself unelectable on the national level? Bush is certainly the kind of Republican who is capable of siphoning of independents, and I'm sure Hillary would rather run against Ted Cruz or even Rand Paul.

Although demographic projections seem to indicate a long term net gain for Democrats, these changes don't occur overnight. I don't think the 2016 election is nearly the sure win that many of my fellow Democrats predict. Hillary won't be able to run against GWB's ghost as Obama did.

[Jimmy]

I am making my prediction now, Hillary will not be the Democratic nominee.

[Roald]

I am making my prediction now, Hillary will not be the Democratic nominee.

Well, you may be right but she has a VERY good chance. The money, infrastructure, and buzz are in her favor. Of course, they were in her favor when a junior senator form Illinois showed up and ruined her coronation in 2008. But at this point, there isn't really a viable alternative.

Elizabeth Warren? She'd likely lose a general election and that will spook Democrats in the primaries. The guy from Maryland? Hell, I'm a Democrat and even I can't remember his name. No, there's a feeling among Democrats that we already produced the first black president and now we're going to put the first woman in the White House.

Is it possible that she could once again be derailed by a charismatic insurgent? Sure, but it's not likely. Many Dems aren't too happy with Obama and attribute this to his lack of experience. I just don't see another newcomer like Warren (her biggest threat) garnering the necessary support.

Biden might be able to pull it off.

This is shaping up to be a battle of manners between country club Republicans and country club Democrats. If nothing else, it'll be hilarious watching the multimillionaires trying to outdo each other with faux folksiness.

[SteveFoerster]

Biden might be able to pull it off.

Joe Biden has about as much chance of being president as I do. If for whatever reason Clinton doesn't get the Democrats' nod, then Warren will drink his milkshake.

This is shaping up to be a battle of manners between country club Republicans and country club Democrats. If nothing else, it'll be hilarious watching the multimillionaires trying to outdo each other with faux folksiness.

Ugh, I hate that about politics. When most politicians say "folks" it sounds so fake that I think afterwards they have to wash their mouths out with cognac.

[Roald]

It's been a while since this thread has seen activity, but I think an update is warranted.

A few observations:

I am surprised at the degree to which the email scandal has exposed weaknesses with the Clinton campaign. Of course, the standard caveats apply: the primaries are still months away, and the national election is still over a year away. Things can change.

At this point, however, both the impact of the email scandal and the popularity of Sanders illustrate the inherent problems that Clinton faces. To put it simply, there are just a helluva lot of people who don't like her and many are in her own party. Part of Sanders' appeal is that he isn't Hillary Clinton. His comparative candor and genuineness (for lack of a better term) has only highlighted her own shortcomings.

Her handling of the email scandal has been inexplicably poor, and has reinforced every negative notion about her. She comes across as aloof, smug, and entitled. I find it very hard to believe that she will be able to attract independent voters in states like Colorado, North Carolina, and Ohio.

That said, she still has a very good chance of getting the Democratic nomination. I mean, other than New Hampshire is Sanders really going to win another primary? Probably not.

So how does look in a national campaign? That depends on who the Republicans nominate. If it's Trump or Cruz (it won't be), she wins. If it's Bush or Rubio, I think she is far more vulnerable now than I would have predicted. If the Republicans are smart, they may well be able to pull this off.

[mattchand]

Nah...... [Deleted post]

[mattchand]

It's been a while since this thread has seen activity, but I think an update is warranted.

That said, she still has a very good chance of getting the Democratic nomination. I mean, other than New Hampshire is Sanders really going to win another primary? Probably not.

It was closer than anyone would have thought, but she's got it now.

So how does look in a national campaign? That depends on who the Republicans nominate. If it's Trump or Cruz (it won't be), she wins. If it's Bush or Rubio, I think she is far more vulnerable now than I would have predicted. If the Republicans are smart, they may well be able to pull this off.

This election has taken the most bizarre turns of any in my lifetime. It seems to me that we are now looking at an electoral choice between "Brave New World" (Hilary) and "Idiocracy" (Trump). For the first time in my life, I will be voting either third party, or some joke write-in for President in the US. I'm fairly disgusted.

[hierophant]

It's been a while since this thread has seen activity, but I think an update is warranted.

It's interesting how bad most of the early predictions were.

This election has taken the most bizarre turns of any in my lifetime. It seems to me that we are now looking at an electoral choice between "Brave New World" (Hilary) and "Idiocracy" (Trump).

It's an illustration of a political dynamic that we see duplicated all over the Western world. We saw it with Brexit. It's apparent with Marine LePen in France, in the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary and with the AfD in Germany. We saw it in the recent Austrian elections and in the growth of new parties in Scandinavia. We see it in Angela Merkel's growing struggles. On the left we see it with Syriza in Greece and Bernie Sanders' campaign displayed many of the same traits. Even Prime Minister Abe in Japan shows signs of it. It's not a uniquely American thing at all.

Everywhere it's a populist insurrection that sets the average voter against the ruling elites. Here in the US it's a repudiation of the "globalism" that both American parties, both 'liberals' and 'conservatives', and most of our would-be 'leaders' (Obama and Hillary, along with the Bush's, Rubio and the rest) have traditionally supported and facilitated.

I think that the way to understand Trump is to see him as an American nationalist first and foremost. His positions on everything from immigration to trade to international affairs is shaped by what he believes is in the American people's interest. He doesn't believe that totally open borders are in the people's interest. Immigrants need to obey US immigration law as a condition of entry and we have to have some idea who they are and what their background is, so that they don't represent a threat to the people already here. He doesn't believe that running huge trade deficits every year with countries like China is in the American interest. He doesn't believe that de-industrialising the United States, closing factories everywhere and shipping all their jobs overseas is in the American interest. (The reason why we won World War II was that we outmanufactured Germany and Japan, and flooded the world with tanks, planes and ships in just 3 1/2 years. So what will happen if a war erupts with China when China has all the manufacturing capability?)

There's a reason why the establishments of both American parties hate him so passionately, and why conventional European elite opinion reviles him. He goes directly against the political doctrine that nations no longer mean much of anything in our globalizing world, that the future lies in increasingly quasi-governmental international organizations like the European Union ("Ever closer union!"), into which all of the former nation-states surrender their sovereignty (and their cultural distinctiveness along with it). But as we saw with Brexit, sometimes the people have other ideas. They see the efforts to centralize all power in fewer hands, further away from and less accountable to the people they supposedly represent, along with the tendency to imagine the world's peoples, traditions and cultures as increasingly homogeneous and fungible, as essentially totalitarian.

This is going to be an election like no others in US history, an insurrection of American people against all of their self-appointed opinion-leaders -- the rich, the powerful, the media pundits, the university professors... and the aristocratic Bush and Clinton families who believe that they can play by different rules than the 'little people' (as Hillary showed with her smug and arrogant responses to questions about her server).

My prediction is that Hillary will probably win in 2016, but American politics will be transformed. A dramatic new fault-line has appeared that doesn't correspond to the old Republican-Democrat divide or to the old left-right dichotomy. It isn't about who is a "liberal" and who is a "conservative" any longer. Those terms are largely meaningless these days. We see self-styled 'conservatives' lining up with Hillary because she and they identify with the elites, and we see rank and file 'working-class' voters from the Bernie Sanders coalition sliding over to Trump. There's going to be a wholesale realignment of American politics, I think. There were several in the 19th century, but really none in the 20th.

The next few decades in American (and European) politics will be marked by the growing division between the people (upon whom democracy is supposedly based) and the oligarchs once called 'aristocrats' who today imagine themselves as the 'superior' ones, the governmental, media, academic and business elites who presume to herd the rest of the people (like sheep) into a future that they don't really want.

[hierophant]

It's been a while since this thread has seen activity, but I think an update is warranted.

It's interesting how bad most of the early predictions were.

And now that the November election has come and gone, maybe it's time to revisit it again.

In my last post I wrote:

Everywhere it's a populist insurrection that sets the average voter against the ruling elites. Here in the US it's a repudiation of the "globalism" that both American parties, both 'liberals' and 'conservatives', and most of our would-be 'leaders' (Obama and Hillary, along with the Bush's, Rubio and the rest) have traditionally supported and facilitated.

I think that the way to understand Trump is to see him as an American nationalist first and foremost. His positions on everything from immigration to trade to international affairs is shaped by what he believes is in the American people's interest...

I still think that's clearly true.

There's a reason why the establishments of both American parties hate him so passionately, and why conventional European elite opinion reviles him. He goes directly against the political doctrine that nations no longer mean much of anything in our globalizing world, that the future lies in increasingly quasi-governmental international organizations like the European Union ("Ever closer union!"), into which all of the former nation-states surrender their sovereignty (and their cultural distinctiveness along with it). But as we saw with Brexit, sometimes the people have other ideas. They see the efforts to centralize all power in fewer hands, further away from and less accountable to the people they supposedly represent, along with the tendency to imagine the world's peoples, traditions and cultures as increasingly homogeneous and fungible, as essentially totalitarian.

This is going to be an election like no others in US history, an insurrection of American people against all of their self-appointed opinion-leaders -- the rich, the powerful, the media pundits, the university professors... and the aristocratic Bush and Clinton families who believe that they can play by different rules than the 'little people' (as Hillary showed with her smug and arrogant responses to questions about her server).

And despite the political establishments of both parties opposing him, and despite almost universal hostility in the media, Trump won!

It's actually pretty amazing.

Historians are going to be looking at 2016 for the next generation, trying to figure out how the culture's self-styled opinion-leaders ("journalists", pundits, celebrities, university professors, bureaucrats...) could have lost their much vaunted influence of such a large portion of the electorate without even noticing it. (There's a hint of pre-revolutionary France about it, the pre-1789 ancien regime.)

That's the most important aspect to recent events I think. The fact that in ostensibly democratic societies elite opinion has become so unaware of, disinterested in and dismissive of the views and and interests of the "little" people.

My prediction is that Hillary will probably win in 2016

I was wrong there. I guess that I trusted the polls and pundits too much myself. I always thought that Trump's victory was possible, but I never thought that it was likely.

but American politics will be transformed. A dramatic new fault-line has appeared that doesn't correspond to the old Republican-Democrat divide or to the old left-right dichotomy. It isn't about who is a "liberal" and who is a "conservative" any longer. Those terms are largely meaningless these days. We see self-styled 'conservatives' lining up with Hillary because she and they identify with the elites, and we see rank and file 'working-class' voters from the Bernie Sanders coalition sliding over to Trump. There's going to be a wholesale realignment of American politics, I think. There were several in the 19th century, but really none in the 20th.

But I think that I was 100% right about that.

[some gobbledygook]

Indeed – we live in interesting and what a friend recently described to me as ‘mighty times’.
Thanks for posting this reflection, it’s good to have some activity here.