The early Presidential polls are interesting. With Hillary coming in with 68% of the support for the Democrat nod, it’s hard to envision a scenario where the nomination isn’t hers for the taking. Her closest challenger is Joe Biden, apparently popular in The Villages and with the writers of Saturday Night Live, with 12%. Andrew Cuomo (aka “Who?” outside of New York) at 4% can’t even compete with the left fringe candidate Elizabeth Warren at 7%.
The Republican numbers are far more interesting. Christie and Jeb Bush split the establishment vote at 16% and 12% respectively. If Christie doesn’t self-destruct, the establishment will probably line up behind him and his ability to win in blue states. Jeb Bush is a decent candidate, but God help us, are we so devoid of imagination that we would end up with Clinton vs. Bush again? The conservative/Tea Party vote is split evenly between Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, with Scott Walker close behind. Neither Christie or Bush have any appeal to the more radical half of the party, and their nomination would probably lead to what has become the typical result for Republican contenders for the presidency. Paul, Cruz, and Walker’s negatives are too high and they are not likely to be nominated, and if nominated very unlikely to appeal to independents. Of the field, only Ryan and Rubio seem to be positioned to unite the warring factions of the GOP. Both have obstacles to overcome. Rubio has issues with his Tea Party base over his immigration positions; and Ryan, along with being half of the losing ticket in 2012, has some baggage from the most recent budget deal. No candidate will appeal perfectly to every faction of the party or the electorate as a whole, but at this point, I’d say the GOP’s best shot would be with a Ryan/Rubio pairing for 2016.
The question is whether Hillary, with her unified support from the Democrats can be defeated by anyone. Up to a few months ago, the answer to that question would have been no. But then a certain turkey took to flight, or should I say miserably failed to take to flight. Enter stage left: OBAMACARE. The Affordable Care Act, enacted without bi-partisan support is owned entirely by the Democrats. Meeting with failure at every turn, its rollout has been ineptly handled to the point of universal ridicule and disdain. The cures for the rollout being cobbled together with patches and postponements, the next coming maelstrom is the actual implementation of the law, which promises to be even more catastrophic than the abominable rollout. I am not generally swayed by prophets of doom, but the naysayers for this law have to date proven to be wrong only in their degree of understatement for the failure. The narrow margin by which the law was enacted means that any Democratic candidate that supported it is personally responsible for what we are now stuck with. Healthcare has become the new “third rail” of politics, destroying otherwise viable candidates. It almost deep sixed Bill Clinton’s second term, and then did not rear its head for years. Revived by the left in 2008, it’s one of the avenues of dishonesty that Barack Obama used to defeat Hillary Clinton, the original architect of “Universal Healthcare”. Remember candidate Obama railing against Mrs. Clinton’s insistence for an “individual mandate” to purchase health insurance? Another issue he has “evolved” on. If you want to look at the eventual embrace of Mr. Obama of the individual mandate in terms of evolution, with all the loss of policies, quality healthcare, and freedom that entails, then the end result of that evolution is a species of lame duck. Maybe “dead duck” would be more descriptive of the Democrat plight, as Obamacare seems to be the meteor that will lead to the natural selection annihilation of the current big government democratic brand. Even in 2012, if Mitt Romney had not been saddled with his own version of the cancer, would he not have had a more viable path to victory? Healthcare is the Deathstar of political candidates, and 2014 will likely be the wake-up call for Democrats to run from it. Hillary will have to try to do just that, but that will require some pretty miraculous political magic. Even so the momentum will be with the GOP, and Hillary won’t have the benefit of incumbency. She will now be a very vulnerable candidate if the Republicans don’t shoot themselves in the foot again with an unexciting or unelectable candidate.
IMHO: The healthcare debacle isn’t the only sign that the big government trend is on the wane. There is a point where edginess goes over the edge, and many of the liberal causes have done just that. There is a societal reaction, and the evidence of it can be seen everywhere from the President’s approval rating, to the new found integrity of the mainstream press, to the amusing muscle flexing of Duck Dynasty fans. How much of a hit the Dems will take in 2014 remains to be seen, but right now it’s clear that they will take a hit. Just the same it would take a catastrophic election to dislodge Hillary from her coronation. If she chose not to run, the vacuum left behind would be enormous. An intriguing possibility in the wake of wholesale rebellion from liberalism would be the nomination of a blue dog democrat like Joe Manchin to fill the void left by the departing progressives… sorry, I was day-dreaming! No, I suspect the political landscape will continue to be filled with turkeys and ducks. Let’s hope the electorate has lost its taste for poultry.
