This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner. They are the most compelling argument I’ve seen against American exceptionalism.
….There are those who say, cynically, if this is the dim-witted freak show the Republicans want to present in 2012, so be it. I disagree. One of them could get elected. You never know. Mick Huckabee, the front-runner if you can believe it, might have to negotiate a trade agreement, or a defense treaty, with the Indonesian President some day. Newt might have to discuss very delicate matters of national security with the President of Pakistan. And so I plead, as an unflinching American patriot — please Mitch Daniels, please Jeb Bush, please run. I may not agree with you on most things, but I respect you. And you seem to respect yourselves enough not to behave like public clowns.
I don’t know about Jeb, but I agree that Mitch Daniels seems like he ought to be a decent candidate. He’s a genuine conservative, not a RINO sellout, but also not a wingnut. He’s a midwesterner, has experience in the Bush administration, and commands a fair amount of establishment respect. Not my cup of tea, obviously, but his background ought to be appealing to a fair number of Republicans.
But the usual question remains: how does he get through the primaries? When he hops over to Iowa, they’ll expect him to denounce sharia law, make jokes about Obama’s Kenyan birth, throw himself wholeheartedly into the culture wars, pretend that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, and make dire remarks about the specter of socialism taking over America. In other words, he’ll have to act like a public clown, and if he doesn’t do it, he’ll lose.
So it’s pretty much a no-win scenario for him. If he’s smart, he’ll wait for 2016 and hope that the Republican Party has come to its senses by then.
