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 It’s simply a sign that the current parties no longer
represent coherent groupings of allies.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.”
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