Sure, the corpses of the fallen in the 2014 election are scarce cold in their political graves, but hey, the Iowa caucuses are a mere 53 weeks away. 2016 is coming! On the Democratic side, it’s still not clear which obscure weirdo Hillary Clinton will blow her prohibitive lead to, but the Republican side is shaping up to be quite the busy clown orgy. Let’s gaze in dismay at this gabbling horror of potential GOP 2016 candidates!
Now, before we enter the circus tent and you start shaking your head at all the freaks, remember: the Republicans have to nominate SOMEBODY. The clown car can only hold so many, and eventually, after all the pratfalls and pies in faces, they’re going to nominate one of these guys–and it’s going to be a guy, New Mexico governor Susana Martinez ain’t a billionaire who can outspend her way to the nomination. Anyway. Let’s laugh at some clowns.
Every election cycle, there are several categories of candidates:
Category I: Plausible potential nominees. This category used to be intuitively obvious. Prominent senators. Governors of states with actual populations. Telegenic war heroes. Vice presidents. For Republicans, the guy who came in second last time. Now, though, it’s become tougher to call, since this category has become chaotic and can include ladies and draft dodgers and black guys with foreign names.
Category II: Second-tier people looking to get their tickets punched so they can be a contender someday, maybe be in Category I next time. Think Al Gore in 1988, or Mitt Romney in the decades before 2012.
Category III: This usually consists of a couple of mediocre politicians with grossly inflated senses of self worth who flame out amusingly. We see you choking on that corn dog, Tim Pawlenty! Oops, Rick Perry! America HAS no mayor, Rudy!
Category IV: Laughable kooks. Seriously, Herman Cain. You, too, Ben Carson. Unless you conquered Europe or put Richmond to the sword, the presidency is not going to be your first elective office. Go be a shitty governor somewhere. Sam Brownback can give you tips if you need some.
So, what does the crop look like this time?
Jeb Bush
Perhaps the third or fourth smartest offspring of disastrous one-term Presidential fiasco George Heironymous Weaseltongue Bush, portly Jeb combines the charm and sense of wealthy entitlement of Mitt Romney, the charisma of Tim Pawlenty, and the magnificent genes of someone who sprang from the sour loins of Poppy and Barbara Bush. Truly, this makes him a dream candidate. He does have some down sides, though. Every pound shed by Chris Christie has settled on Jeb Bush’s neck, for instance. He is easily the most marbled of the 2016 candidates, which means he’ll probably win South Carolina before flaming out, like grotesque space-beast Newton Leroy Gingrich in 2012. He hasn’t run for anything since the Saddam Hussein administration, and he wasn’t very good at it back then. The GOP has nominated men who’ve f**ked or been extruded by Barbara Bush a couple of times now, so I guess that makes him reasonably plausible, but honestly, I think he’s going to plunge into Category III irrelevance eventually.
What does he run on? “I’m smarter than my brother, George”? Assumes facts not in evidence. Anyway, can’t all the candidates except maybe Rick Perry say that? That’s a thing you’ll hear a lot–Jeb’s the smart one–but anybody who says that to you, point out that he’s surrounded himself with the same cretinous family retainers as his brother, and that, in one of the best electoral environments for GOP candidates, he bungled his first gubernatorial campaign against a guy who talked about raccoons all the time, while his dumb brother beat the formidable Ann Richards. Oh, and ask anybody who says that he’s-the-smart-one bullshit to name five policies on which Dumb George and Smart Jeb disagreed. What else has he got? “I can speak Spanish”? So can Rubio and Cruz, though Cruz is kind of hard to understand because of his Canadian snow people accent. Remember that same stale, out-of-touch-with-voters thing Romney had? Get ready to choke down some more of that, now with added Bushmentum.
Chris Christie
This unlikeable lard-ass has spent the last year busily de-larding. He no longer has to buy suits from the circus freak supply store, and can now fit into the Big-N-Fat Store’s Orson Welles collection. This transformation has done nothing to sweeten his demeanor. What category was Huntsman in last time? Put Christie in that one. Remember how everybody was talking up Guiliani in 2007, and how, in retrospect, batshit crazy that turned out to be? The same derision we gave Guiliani in 2009, we’ll be giving to Christie in 2017.
Honestly, what does he run on? “I can govern a purple state”? Iowa pig-men and flinty New Hampshire maple miners don’t care about that, and hell, South Carolina hill folk don’t even know what a purple state is. Besides, Scott Walker can say that too, in a dog-whistle-y way, without the apostasy of having hugged the Kenyan Usurper. “I’m an abrasive northeastern asshole who talks tough and takes no guff”? Ask President Guiliani how that worked out. Christie will bark rudely at some Iowa pigfucker at a corn dog stand in Ames, and that will be the end of him. In terms of fundraising, he’s trapped between the flabby hammer of Jeb Bush and the hard robotic anvil of Mitt Romney. The main thing keeping him afloat is that he’s been busily fellating Iowa governor Terry Branstad for about a year and a half. That can get you only so far. What’s his path to the nomination? Lose everything until Florida? That’s the Guiliani Cloud Cuckoo Land strategy.
Ted Cruz
He’s Canadian, and thus ineligible to President. He has an ACTUAL foreign country birth certificate. He’ll run anyway, but he won’t win. Maybe he can run for President of Canada someday. Does Canada have a president? Or are they run by a wise council of snow-elders? Whatever. Cruz will never be Supreme Snow Elder of Canada, either, or coach of his beloved hometown Calgary Flames. He thinks he can ride the Tea Party kookball express all the way to the nomination. The election of Barack Obama made every guy who’s been a senator for six months think he can be president. This asshole Ted Cruz is the price we pay for having President Obama. Category III/Category IV.
Rand Paul
Remember: the Republicans have to nominate SOMEBODY. If all that’s left at the end of the day is a batshit senator wearing William Shatner’s “Wrath of Khan”-era toupee, well, what can you do? A while back, I would have put him down as Category III or Category IV, but he’s done a pretty good job of marketing himself as a “new” kind of Republican, so he might be able to thread his way between the batshittery of the Ted Cruz wing, and the boring old-school sameness of establishment hacks like Jeb. He’s a kook, but he has an ability to seem intermittently reasonable that could be very threatening to Hillary in the general election, assuming Hillary manages to not lose the nomination to some random state senator or alderman or something.
Marco Rubio
Whoever they nominate is going to need a running mate. Marco Rubio knows this. He’s the closest thing we have to Category II now. What an amusing running mate he will be for Mitt 3.0. Jim Webb will positively destroy him in the VP debates.
Paul Ryan
Ben Carson
Every election cycle needs a batshit crazy whackadoodle who’s never even run for dogcatcher to get delusions of presidentialness and vie for the coveted Steve Forbes Trophy. If you thought comedian and performance artist Herman Cain was a hoot, wait until you get a load of Brain Doctor Ben.
Scott Walker
Koch Industries Resource Extraction Specialist and part-time Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has a whiff of that Pawlenty charmlessness about him, but remember, they have to nominate SOMEBODY. He could do well in primaries among voters who have never seen him or smelled him or heard him speak.
Richard “Shoeless Dick” Santorum
He came in second last time, which means it’s his turn. No billionaires are showing up in his hobo camp with bindles full of money, though, so it’s hard to see him going all the way. Still, his mix of cloying folksongs, hobo chanties, and rightwing claptrap took him farther than anyone thought in 2012, so who knows.
Willard “Mitt” Romney
But hanging over all of these clowns, like an unelectable robotic Sword of Damocles, is the grim specter of Willard Jackasticus Lannister Romney, Lord of the Robo-men, who may harbor ambitions to be the William Jennings Bryan of mega-rich manbots and run again and again until he is disassembled. He is bad news for the ones courting the GOP establishment, like Bush and Christie. He has a bottomless trough of money, and he’s willing to go savagely negative, and all the horrific things he found out about these other guys during the 2012 VP vetting process would make great negative ads. Hell, the GOP nominated thrice-damned dark mage Richard Nixon twice. Anything is possible. We have a black president now. An elderly Mormon failure-cloaked cyborg is not that implausible anymore.
