a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

multiple answers to whats so damn attractive about BC

Douthat, NYT's resident opinion-con, wrote yesterday that it has to be Rubio by process of elimination... or it will be Mitt to the rescue.

he said, clutching his rosary beads

If it's Rubio, the Republicans are FUCKED. From where I sit, he's dead in the water. He's young, which pundits and campaign manager types keep insisting is a selling point, but he's as stupid as Scott Walker and, like Walker, routinely LOOKS stupid in public. Also, the Cuban thing is gonna hurt him, bad. Alfred knows as well as anyone that nobody gives a shit about Cubans who wasn't already of voting age in 1959, and the majority of other Latinos HATE them because of the special treatment they've gotten re immigration for the last 50+ years.

As I've mentioned, it's so fucking rank when "strategists" think putting a guy with a funny name who speaks Spanish on the national GOP ticket will attract Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Argentines, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans.

If the republicans are fucked with Rubio, then they're pretty much just fucked...

except that Clinton has a hard core of haters.

Sure, but not more than 50% of the electorate, surely? Probably enough to continue the grievance politics for the next eight years, but that's probably worst case scenario for a lot of the party.

As I've mentioned, it's so fucking rank when "strategists" think putting a guy with a funny name who speaks Spanish on the national GOP ticket will attract Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Argentines, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans.

we're talking about Jeb! here, right

except that Clinton has a hard core of haters.

Who have been reliably voting Republican at least since Reagan, and can thus be discounted. Clinton may cause some lefty voters to stay home; she will not cause any Democratic voters to vote Republican, and I suspect any Republican voters who might otherwise have stayed home, but who will turn out to vote against her, will be balanced by Democratic voters who'll show up to vote for the first female President.

Who was the last republican nominee who, if he'd won, wouldn't have been the worst thing to ever happen to America?

It's beyond amazing that Jeb! of all people in the universe has decided that 9-11 is the hill he wants to die on. Like, literally any other strategy would work better. Smearing yourself in dog feces and shouting the lyrics to "Cop Killer" would work better.

xpost If Bob Dole had won '96 maybe we would have had Obamacare a decade early

Yeah, I was thinking Dole. It's hard say as contexts change. I mean, Romney looks downright amazing compared to the gaggle of dipshits currently running.

yeah, mccain wouldn't have been a catastrophe either. look where romney, mccain, dole, even fucking W are compared with the current GOP candidates:

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/enten-feature-kasich-1.png?w=610&h=993

trump and carson are on there, by the way, their dots are just to the right of your computer screen

(yes i realize that trump is in some ways not a conservative at all. i was just trying to be funny but it's 9am so i'm cranky)

McCain would be the worst because he would have died in office and we would all be in hell now.

McCain has never met a war he didn't like - but then a single-dimension "how conservative" measure is kind of meaningless - trump forex has a bunch of economic populism going on. xp oh fair enough.

The Party was already moving away from McCain, and who knows if the Dems would've kept Congress after 2010.

mccain in 2000 possibly vaguely tolerable with a dem congress, mccain/palin 2008 idk. agree that dole might have actually been less harmful than clinton. poppy bush likely would not have stirred up the gingrich congress and welfare reform. hard to vote for the CIA spook though.

Poppy Bush winning in 1992 is the only one of the (im)plausibles that makes me wonder what might've happened.

utopia most likely. new dems discredited, easier for progressives to pin republicans as the corporate free-trade bad-for-workers party. cuomo and jesse jackson squeak out a win in 1996, george w. bush manages a fantasy football team and tough new regulations on the banking sector prevent the fiscal collapse, plus candy for everyone.

I still the Dems would have lost Congress in the '90s regardless, and I don't know if Poppy was strong enough politically to have resisted the Gingrichers.

*still think

https://vine.co/v/erQmKFXZ6OD

i love how challenged he looks before he's got the head/hole situation figured out

give this guy the button

love how Barry Goldwater still looks like Attila the Hun.

who was the last republican nominee who, if he'd won, wouldn't have been the worst thing to ever happen to America?

― I Was Picking Up A Teaspoon When Something Happened To My Spine (Old Lunch)

Ford, Poppy, and Dole.

With Ryan bound to become unelectable due to the shenanigans going on in the house, who even stands a chance as a republican candidate in 2020? And who can oppose vice president Sanders in the election in 24?

lol Hillary will def not pick Bernie as VP

xp im gonna say time BC he'll be 83 in 2024

At 90 he'll be the oldest president ever!

Maybe the GOP will turn up another moderate governor of a coastal state by 2020 and that person won't be waiting for a federal indictment to come down like Chris Christie is.

Ben Carson's coming to West Memphis for a campaign rally.

This alone convinces me that his is not a real campaign.

OK, he's black, like most people who live in that metro. But that's about where any similarities between him and the people he'll be speaking to ends.

While this state has gone so red, you can develop film outdoors on the sidewalk, I don't think the GOP even bothers to field local candidates over in that neck of the woods.

love how Barry Goldwater still looks like Attila the Hun.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 27, 2015 9:46 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, it's amazing how much of an outlier goldwater was. there's a reason why he lost the popular vote by the widest margin in the last 80 years

if somehow trump were to snag the nomination i think we'd see something similar (or worse for trump)

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/i-am-fun-51731

. “I’m Presbyterian,” Mr. Trump proclaimed at a rally in Florida last Friday. “Boy, that’s down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about.”

trump is really unbelievable. i mean this is kind of stuff you expect from some outsider candidate in a county board election in bumblefuck kansas.

haha my favorite bit from the recent cover story on Trump in Rolling Stone was this:

He burrows into his notes, marking a section in ballpoint. Not 60 seconds pass before he looks at me again. "You know New Hampshire has a huge problem with heroin? Why do ya s'pose that is?"

I tell him that it probably has to do with OxyContin and school kids raiding their parents' medicine chests. They run out of pills, then find that bags of heroin are cheaper. "Yeah? Well, which is worse for you, the heroin or the pills?" I explain that they're both derivatives of opium, which is dicey however it's delivered. "Hunh!" he says. "Interesting. I didn't know that. But I gotta get back to my notes!" (At a press conference, an hour later, he'll respond to a question about heroin in New Hampshire by saying that "it starts probably with OxyContin, from what I'm hearing.")

Good Lord, what's he got to say about the Mormons?

when I was mormon as a kid (ugh) I remember hearing people say the church had a lot in common with seventh day adventists

You remember him saying this last week:

"This should actually be the rule in the entire government, where if you're not doing your job, you should be fired." ---

Naturally, the DNC and Jeb Bush pounced on this because he just isn't bothering to show up for work anymore.

He's had a bunch of excuses:

Excuse #1: It’s normal for presidential candidates to miss votes. (Des Moines Register)
Excuse #2: He gets briefed on hearings by his staff. (Washington Post, Politico)
Excuse #3: He would never miss a vote where he would have been the deciding one. (USA Today, Reno Gazette-Journal, Roll Call)
Excuse #4: He’s leaving the Senate. (Republican Primary Debate in Simi Valley, CA)
Excuse #5: Votes he has missed are “show votes.” (Breitbart, Huffington Post)
Excuse #6: He wants his votes to be meaningful. (CNN’s State of the Union)
Excuse #7: He is frustrated. (Washington Post)
Excuse #8: He feels as if he is standing around and doing nothing. (Washington Post)

digby

if his opponents were competent, ''marco no-show,'' a la children's pool game ''marco polo,'' would make a decent campaign ad.

brb gonna start this at Trump rally

I kind of wish fewer members of Congress would show up.

Sooner or later someone will be elected to the house who doesn't realize they're supposed to show up in DC at all

and 74% of likely caucus voters will approve of that

ben carson said that all that he cares about is selling copies of his books, and that he'd like to shit in your mouth! do you approve?

84% yes
7% no
9% undecided

fuck this asssssshole

http://observer.com/2015/10/hillary-clinton-falsely-calls-bernie-sanders-a-sexist/

i'd rather see the GOP win

D'you mean the author of that post? Because, yeah, playing the man-card without using quotes and dates is pretty assholish behaviour.