Can we all stop pretending that there’s any real suspense in this presidential race?
s the children’s book says: Voters, it’s time to “Go the F*k to sleep.” You can turn off Fox, MSNBC, and CNN; you can close Twitter; you can sign off your crazy uncle’s Facebook feed.
I am going to tell you, right now, what the political landscape of the future looks like so you don’t waste your time over the next year listening to a parade of pundits or watching those ridiculous primary debates. The 2016 election is going to come down to Hillary vs. Jeb, of course. Dynasty against dynasty. The campaign that wouldhorrify our Founding Fathers and will bore everyone to tears.
How will this happen?
That Hillary will coast I doubt surprises you. Sure, has her B-list challengers stoking the populist embers in the Democratic base. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are in. Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb may soon follow suit. Each may put up a good fight, raise some decent money and earn a moment in the sun. Collectively, they will force Hillary to finesse sticky issues that pit the Democratic Party’s working class against its donor class. But they won’t fundamentally alter the trajectory of the race. After all, you don’t really think she is going to make herself a fat target and campaign from inside the Goldman Sachs boardroom do you?
For example, while others demand restoring FDR’s Glass-Steagall regulations and breaking up the big banks, she will blur the issue by proposing something like her own tidy package of incredibly wonky banking regulations. They may call them small-bore; she will say she is looking forward and not backward. In the blizzard of policy details, most voters won’t understand what the candidates are talking about, but they will nevertheless walk away thinking Hillary knows what she’s talking about. That will be good enough.
What about the emails? The foreign Clinton Foundation donors? Won’t anything else unnerving turn up? Oh, we’ll have our little media frenzies. The emails she did turn over to the State Department are already drip-drip-dripping out. She may well testify again to the House Benghazi committee. But as we’ve seen with the “Clinton Cash” book release, these kerfuffles mainly serve to whip up Republican froth. Meanwhile Democratic voters are experiencing Clinton Fatigue Fatigue. Comforted by the notion that Clintons know how to shake it off, they’ll do the same.
Might Hillary’s old Iraq vote give a challenger the same opening Barack Obama took to paint her as excessively hawkish? No, because the foreign policy debates of today are not deeply dividing the left. Consider that the most pacifistic of the left have long complained about the president’s use of drones and government surveillance, yet Obama enjoys near unanimous approval among Democrats. Obama has even edged into Syria, as the rise of ISIS brought him closer to Clinton’s earlier position in favor of a more robust military role. There’s no position that Clinton currently holds that makes her vulnerable.
You are probably more shocked that Jeb will have it so easy. He starts off as such a weak frontrunner. He’s mired in a five-way tie for first place nationally, at a piddling 10 percent, in the most recent Quinnipiac Republican primary poll. He’s in a virtual four-way tie in New Hampshire. He doesn’t even amount to the frontrunner in Iowa. And he will face a 2016 conservative field at least a step up from the 2012 clown show. Is there no one who could pick up a head of steam and best Bush mano-a-mano?
Pundits have concocted pat scenarios in which an insurgent could dethrone the scion. All Ted Cruz has to do is unite the Tea Party with the social conservatives. All Marco Rubio had to do is unite the Tea Party with the Establishment. All Rand Paul had to do is attract libertarians who haven’t been Republican activists. Heck, earlier this year, yours truly floated that all Scott Walker has to do is unite the conservative opinion leaders with the conservative grassroots to leap ahead of Bush.
None of that will happen. The Republican Party is just too splintered and too fractionalized. And any conservative consolidation project is severely hampered by the bottomless pit of Republican candidates. Last week we were blessed with Rick Santorum and George Pataki. Lindsey Graham and Rick Perry are expected to jump in this week. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, but it really looks like Donald Trump won’t be far behind.
Each of these hopefuls may be more implausible than the next. But the more candidates that can claim their own chunk of the conservative base—Santorum’s blue-collar social conservatives, Graham’s hard-core hawks, Trump’s angry rich guys who dole out “wife bonuses”—the harder it is for conservatives to pool their resources.
And if there’s one thing Jeb Bush will have that the rest of the field won’t, it is resources. His latest round of “I haven’t made a final decision” coyness is just so can he legally milk every last dollar from the Bush family’s vast donor network for his Right to Rise Super PAC before he becomes an official candidate and canvasses his rich friends all over again for direct donations
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