Posted on 03/23/2015 5:02:01 AM PDT by LeoMcNeil
Ted Cruz is set to announce is candidacy for President of the United States. Rand Paul is apparently going to announce early next month before going on a campaign tour. Until today technically the only candidate was Jeb Bush, who announced late last year his intentions. At the time everyone thought that Bush was going to force everyone else to declare their candidacy early. It doesn’t appear that has happened, Cruz and Paul have appeared in no rush to make a formal announcement. Scott Walker, perhaps the front runner in the race, still hasn’t formally announced his candidacy and there’s no telling when he might do so.
A formal announcement at this point is nothing more than a trivial formality. Cruz, Paul and Walker have been campaigning and engaging in the sort of activities one engages in when running for President. They’ve been doing this for months, arguably since the midterm elections. There has never been any doubt that Cruz, Paul and Walker were going to run. There’s little doubt that Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum will be running. The legal distinction between an exploratory committee and a campaign committee may matter to the FEC but in the political world it doesn’t matter at all. The 2016 primary season has been under way for some time, the only people who disagree are the paper pushers in the Federal government.
There is one consistent thing about the slate of 99% certain to run candidates. All but one of them is a conservative, either appealing to Christian evangelicals, Tea Party conservatives or Tea Party libertarians. Bush being the lone exception, it is without question that he has the support of the establishment moderate wing of the party. In fact, Bush has been openly hostile to conservatives on the campaign trail. The problem for conservatives is that this election is shaping up just like 2008 and 2012. There are too many conservatives running and only one establishment moderate. In a lust for power, half a dozen or more conservatives are willing to sacrifice the country in a vain attempt to obtain power for themselves.
Some of these people shouldn’t even run. In fact, they should step back and act as kingmakers. The endorsement of someone like Mike Huckabee would significantly help one of the other conservative candidates. Huckabee doesn’t have what it takes to win the nomination. He hasn’t been in office in years, he’s selling magic pills for diabetes on the internet wherein he looks like a rabid snake oil salesman. Nevertheless, he has a loyal base that likely would vote for whoever he endorses. There’s power in king making, a lot more than losing a race for President at Huckabee’s age. We could say the same thing about Rick Santorum. He hasn’t been in office in nearly a decade, he got annihilated the last time he ran for US Senate. He was the conservative of last resort against Romney in 2012, he really wasn’t a good candidate. Yet he’s likely to cater to his own vanity and run in 2016, further diluting the conservative vote. Bush must be thrilled.
At least Cruz and Paul have more base support than Huckabee and Santorum. Having said that, do Republicans really believe the country is going to elect a first term Senator again? Obama didn’t exactly work out very well and while Cruz and Paul are obviously better than Obama, most of the country have no idea who these two Senators are or where they come from. In the last century our country has only elected a sitting Senator twice and only one of those times did a sitting Senator defeat a candidate with executive experience. Kennedy’s victory over Vice President Nixon in 1960 was the lone exception, otherwise this country has elected Governors or Vice Presidents. In other words, the country has a tendency to elect men with executive experience. While Cruz is magnificent on any number of issues, he’s going to have a very difficult time convincing people that a first term Senator should be the Commander in Chief. Especially after eight years of Obama. Paul has the same problem. If only we could get rid of some of these candidates, Jeb Bush could be defeated. Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen.
-—My vote goes to the conservative. The GOPe only runs sellout republicans.——
So Walker, Kasis, Pense, Sessions, Huckabee are not conservatives...?
Granted, they are not as conservative as Cruz...
Thanks for the sage advice...About wise up.../ s
I can think for myself and can clearly define what a conservative is or is not...been one for 35 years...
Watch what they do, not what they say...
Look at their positions on amnesy.
Ted Cruz is going to have the exact same problems any other potential GOP nominee concerning illegal immigration...except Bush...who seems to want to just toss open the gates..
Is Cruz going to deport the XXX million illegals already here? No...he can't...
He is going to deny benefits to illegals already here getting benefits ? ...No... he isn't...Congress job...they will never do that in any serious fashion ...
Is Cruz going to have to find a way to get the many thousands of so called "dreamers" mainlined into citizenship...Of course he is...many of these people were brought here as children already living in this country...He's going to throw out a 21 year old illegal who has been here for 18 years, works, pay taxes, ... of course not...
Cruz and other can do many things like upholding the current laws, e-verfiy, serious fines or prison time for employers who hire illegals, actually tap down on fraud in social welfare programs ...
Amnesty is in many ways a red herring ...meat for the conservatives...it's actually a very complex issue which as much as I dislike the idea will take bipartisan effort to solve...
It's really a moot point until a actual real fence is put up...which might happen in the next millenium...
Are we going to be seeing the psychotic spam monkies spouting “rand paul! rand paul! rand paul! oh boy, rand paul!” like we did with the poop throwing Ron Paulistinians last time out?
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