Republican Party Chorus Line: The Clown Car is Now a Party Bus

The Republican Party’s chorus line of would-be presidential candidates, which could have squeezed into a clown car a few weeks ago, now needs a party bus to get around in. When it comes to running for president in the Republican party, it isn’t about winning….it is all about running for its own sake, because simply running for president – even if you don’t have a chance of winning – can either cost you a fortune…or earn you one.

Most of these candidates don’t stand a ghost of a chance at winning the nomination, much less the election, but the prospect of becoming president of the United States isn’t the motivation that’s encouraging them to apply for the job. As a matter of fact, most of these people don’t want to be president of the United States at all. They just want to run. Here are some of the things that you can expect to get simply by running for the presidency:

Lots and lots of free travel: The moment you throw your hat in the ring, you are entitled to use campaign funds to travel – always in first class, private jet or on the campaign bus – paid for by your campaign contributors. Granted, most that free travel is to places like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in the dead of winter, with some time off for bad behavior in Nevada, but you can also book yourself into more pleasant destinations because they also have primaries in places like California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Hawaii. Have fun while it lasts.

Lots and lots of free publicity: As soon as you announce yourself as a candidate for the presidency, otherwise serious journals of public opinion (as well as many more which aren’t that serious) will report – and scrutinize – every press release you send them and every public statement you make, regardless of your qualifications to express that opinion. That equates to millions of dollars worth of free publicity for your latest book, or your next television series after you lose your bid. Just running for president, whether or not you have any business ever living in the White House, automatically qualifies you as a pundit, whether or not your public statements make any sense at all. Congratulations: you’re not just newsworthy, you are now a frequent news item.

Lots and lots of money: If you think that running for office is an altruistic activity, think again, because just running for office gives you a leg up on the speaker circuit after your bid fails. At first, of course, you take the speaking gigs to pay off your campaign debt, unless you can find some sugar daddies who are willing to throw you some cash in anticipation of your next run. Depending upon how close you come to the brass ring, you can also expect to be offered seats on the boards of directors of some of America’s richest companies, not because they need you but only because your name will look good on their mastheads.

How much can you make on the speaker’s tour? How about $50,000 per gig. Do one a week, take two weeks off each summer, and you still come home with $2.5 million a year. Are there really that many speaking gigs out there? There are around 85 categories of trade associations, with an average of 150 members in each category, for a total of 12,750 national associations…and each one of those trade associations has regional, state and local chapters. That’s more than five million possible speaking gigs. Not all of them hire fan dancers (the technical term for a guest speaker who has drawing power), and not all of them pay $50,000 a shot, but the business of being a failed primary candidate can be very, very lucrative. It turns out that losing pays much better than winning does.

Being a failed nominee is, however, much less lucrative. Failed candidates have to maintain a certain pose of poise. They have to look like they are all right with not having made it to the Oval Office, but that pose isn’t very convincing if you are running around the country collecting speaking fees. Besides, there’s always the hope that you might get another turn at bat, not that John McCain or Mitt Romney will ever get that phone call.

If you’re not a good public speaker, which might just explain why you didn’t win, you can still pick up some board seats, which run around $600,000 each per year. That’s how much you get paid, not how much you have to pay for the seat. With all that money up for grabs, it becomes easier to see why people who will never win run anyway.

There are, however,  other reasons that people throw their hats into an overcrowded ring. Here are some of them:

You are at the end of your rope in your present job: If you’re a governor of a state where your popularity scores have plummeted to catastrophic lows, like New Jersey governor Chris Christie, 52, or Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, 42, running for president is one way to make a graceful exit from public life, while collecting the chips you need to cash in on the public dole as the U.S. ambassador to some unimportant country, or a cabinet position given in exchange for throwing your support to the right front-runner. (Even if you pick the wrong guy, you can still get a “shut-up” job designed to keep you around….but also to keep you very. very quiet.) Also in this category may be South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, 59, who many conservatives fault for his willingness to occasionally talk to Democrats.

The problem with Chris Christie’s candidacy is that the bombastic New Jersey governor really believes that he can find a way to talk his way out of everything charged against him, while the evidence indicates that his attempts to talk his way out have only dug him in deeper. In other words, Christie believes that style trumps (no pun intended) content.

According to his announcement speech, as reported by The New York Times, Christie thinks that his jingoistic campaign premise… that America cannot afford “another” do-nothing president….will play well with Americans who think that there has been an absence of leadership in the White House. “We need strength and decision-making and authority back in the Oval Office,” he said, but the problem with that rhetoric is that the Republican rap on Obama isn’t that he hasn’t done enough but rather that he has done way too much of the wrong stuff.

Christie’s bigger problem is that he hasn’t really done very much as governor of New Jersey, except to get in trouble. A Salon.com article by Matthew Rozsa lists five major scandals during his term of office, including expense account abuses in the governor’s office, using Hurricane Sandy relief funds to underwrite an advertising campaign aimed at promoting tourism in the Garden State, holding other Hurricane Sandy distributions hostage to politically motivated redevelopment schemes, diverting billions of dollars-worth of Port Authority revenues into unrelated development projects in New Jersey, and privatizing the management of New Jersey’s public employee pension funds, quadrupling the front-loaded management costs for those funds to $600 million a year, at a total cost of $1.5 billion. The fifth scandal surfaced when he vetoed legislation designed to prevent the very abuses of which he has been accused.

Unlike most of the flakes the Republicans are offering the country, Lindsey Graham is a solid, well-informed politician. Graham, a retired Air Force Colonel with time in the regular Air Force, the South Carolina Air National Guard, and the Air Force Reserve, served in the Judge Advocate Corps of the Air Force and did tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan but never claims to have been in combat. Elected to the House of Representatives from South Carolina in 1994, and to the Senate in 2002, Graham was recalled to active duty while he was a sitting senator.

Unfortunately for the nation, and the Republican party, Graham is considered soft (another term for liberal) on climate change, tax reform, immigration reform, and rigid on the sanctity of Supreme Court. He voted to seat both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on the Court and, therefore, is now being held responsible by his potential opponents for the Court’s landmark same-sex marriage ruling, since Sotomayor and Kagan were two of the five justices who voted to make same-sex marriages legal in all 50 states.

That alone probably bars Graham from the top spot on the ticket, but he would make a dandy vice-president behind Jeb Bush. He’s the only Republican on the vice-president candidates list (which includes everyone now running for the top spot) who wouldn’t defame the office, or make Joe Biden look even better than he actually does.

What can you say about Bobby Jindal, after you have said that he’s not good-looking enough to be president? Oh, you don’t think that matters? Get real. We all know we are going to have to look at the winner day after day for the next four years, and you better believe that on a sub-conscious but very real level, it doesn’t matter how qualified you are if you don’t look the part. That’s why neither Marco Rubio nor Ted Cruz stand a chance either. Rubio looks too young, and Cruz just looks goofy. In addition to looking strange, Jindal also looks worried all the time. He can’t help it. That’s just the way his face looks. Worried. With Jindal, the question isn’t whether or not he would make a good president but rather how he ever got elected governor of Louisiana in the first place?

You don’t actually have a job any more: There are a lot of Republican presidential hopefuls in this category, including the putative front-runner, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, 62, as well as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, 57, former New York governor George Pataki, 70, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, 65, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, 59.

In this crowd, Bush is the odds-on favorite to find work in Washington. Agreed, he carries a lot of baggage as the son of one president and the brother of another, both of whom took us to war in the Middle East. A third Bush presidency smacks of a dynasty. He was also the sitting governor of the state that gave George W. Bush the presidency after a contested vote count in Florida. On the other hand, he has maintained a set of moderate political positions that make him the least unpalatable of the currently announced Republican candidates to the all important swing voters. He’s so much more presidential than the competition that the Republicans should just give him the nomination right now, instead of waiting until they gather in Cleveland a year from now, because that’s where they are going to end up….and everyone already knows that.

Rick Perry embarrassed himself so thoroughly in 2012 that he may only be trying again to redeem himself from his previous blunders, but he is so blunder-prone that there’s not much hope for that, according to a 2012 piece on CNNPolitics. Perry blamed his very poor debate performance on medications he was taking for severe back problems. Serious back pain can be debilitating, but so can the inability to keep your facts straight, and Perry committed several factual blunders that, while not on Sarah Palin’s level, were embarrassing enough to keep him from staying in the 2012 race, and memorable enough to haunt him in 2016.

Rick Santorum isn’t waiting for the debates to shoot himself in the foot. He’s already done it by demonstrating his lack of understanding that Supreme Court decisions are not reversible by any entity other than the Supreme Court. According to Salon.Com, (yes, them again) Santorum told “Fox and Friends” co-host Tucker Carlson that he would reverse the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriages in the United States by passing “religious freedom” legislation to protect people of faith from the consequences of the Court’s ruling. Memo to Santorum: the only way to reverse the Court’s ruling is to pass a Constitutional amendment to that effect, because that is the only legislative gambit the Court cannot overturn. Besides which, we already have a federal “Religious Freedom Restoration Act ,” signed into law by Bill Clinton…and overturned by the Supreme Court except in terms of its applicability to federal agencies.

Mike Huckabee has a temper, and that’s all that needs to be said about him, except for the fact that no one takes you seriously after you have served a stint as a talking head on Fox News. (Ask Sarah Palin about that, although there are many other good reasons for not taking her seriously.) During a recent appearance, Huckabee delivered some cringe-worthy comments, reported by RawStory, about how he would have taken advantage of new rules affecting transgender people’s use of public restrooms to hang out in the girl’s locker room, if those rules had existed when he was a teenager, demonstrating a shocking level of gender-issue tone deafness.

George Pataki, the former three-time governor of New York, is very well liked in New York, and absolutely unknown beyond the surrounding states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont. Perhaps the most liberal, and possibly the smartest Republican in the race, he might win in a head to head race with Hillary Clinton, also titularly from New York, but he doesn’t have a shot at winning the nomination. In the Republican party today, liberal is by definition too liberal. At 70 years of age, he has been a bridesmaid three times, having flirted with the idea of running in 2000, 2008, and 2012, and that alone apparently disqualifies him. Worse, he’s Pro-Choice, so it doesn’t matter how smart he is, nor how good he is at getting disaffected Democrats to vote for him because, according to The Washington Post, he will never get past the Tea Party door keepers.

You have a job….but it never hurts to test the waters: There are three candidates in this category, including Texas senator Ted Cruz and Florida senator Marco Rubio, both of whom are 44 year-old first term “ethnic” Senators whose seats are up for grabs in 2016. Swept into office by the Tea Party Rebellion in 2010, neither has distinguished himself in a positive manner during their first terms as senators.

Marco Rubio has already announced that he will not run for both the presidency and reelection to the Senate, even though Florida law allows him to do that, but that only means that he will be out of job in two years if he were to actually win the Republican presidential nomination. Not to worry, though. That won’t happen. He will drop out of the primary process fairly early on to concentrate on his re-election effort.  He’s young, not stupid.  Rubio’s fatal flaw is that he doesn’t look old enough to vote. If he weren’t a senator, he would probably get carded whenever he goes out to a bar, but at least he’s young enough to find a new career for himself.

Ted Cruz has a different problem. Texas law allows him to run for more than one office at the same time, just as Joe Biden and Paul Ryan did in 2008 and 2012, respectively, but Cruz was born in Canada, which some people (including Birther Expert Donald Trump) believe disqualifies him from serving as president. (Note: apparently, foreign birth would disqualify him from serving as president, but would be perfectly legal for him to run for the position in which he could not serve.)

According to Factcheck.org, Cruz, having been born to an American citizen mother living outside the United States, is a native-born citizen under the exact same statute under which Barack Obama was legally entitled to serve as president of the United States regardless of where he was born, a fact that was not lost upon Trump. By allowing Cruz to run for president, the Republican party would be officially admitting that the seven year campaign to discredit and disqualify Obama’s presidency was always based on a false premise. So, Trump has to attack Cruz’s qualifications to serve as president, or admit that he was wrong about Obama in the first place, which is not something that Trump ever does.

Unfortunately, neither Rubio nor Cruz are old enough to be seriously considered as presidential materials, at least not according to the Putin standard.  If you can’t imagine your candidate standing toe-to-toe with Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin (or, for that matter, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) then your guy isn’t seasoned enough yet to sit in the Oval Office, where on-the-job training isn’t really a viable option, as the Obama presidency has proven.

Another member of the Senate class of 2011, Kentucky senator Rand Paul is, at 52, old enough to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate but, like Cruz and Rubio, has not distinguished himself in any meaningful manner. His tendency toward confusing and sometimes contradictory public statements followed up by petulant tirades against his critics for misrepresenting him by simply quoting his own words make him a contentious and unpalatable candidate.

For these three applicants for America’s top job, running for president makes running for re-election to their Senate seats highly problematic. In Rand Paul’s case, it’s worse than problematic, according to Newsmax, because Kentucky law prohibits a candidate from running for two different positions in the same election. Paul’s supporters in Kentucky have tried to get that law changed, but the move has so far been blocked by the Democratic majority in the Kentucky legislature. In retaliation, Kentucky’s Republican party is attempting to circumvent Kentucky law by cancelling the state’s Republican primary and using a caucus system to select the party’s nominees for both president and senator.

This would allow Paul to run for both nominations but, if he were to win both nominations, Kentucky law would still prevent him from running for both positions at the same time. If he were not selected as the Republican party’s standard bearer in the presidential contest, he would still be able to run for reelection to his senate seat….at the cost of seeming like an old-school double-dipping politician while preaching his reform rhetoric to the nation.

Non-Political Candidates: This now brings us to the rump of the batting order, the three would-be Republican presidential candidates who have never been elected to anything and have no public service experience. In other words, three people who know absolutely nothing about how to run a government. This group includes retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, 63, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, 60, and reality television star/real estate tycoon Donald Trump, 69.

Carson has been out in front of the clown car, suggesting that civil unrest could give Barack Obama a pretext for cancelling the 2016 election, something for which there is no provision in the Constitution. He has also suggested that Congress should be able to remove judges for voting for marriage equality, maintains that Obamacare is worst thing since slavery, and believes that Obama is depressing the economy to keep people on welfare. (Notes for Dr. Carson: If you think that Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery, you obviously haven’t experienced either and the economy under Obama has recovered to where it was BEFORE it fell to pieces under George Bush.)

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has four unique claims to fame. Once known as the most powerful woman in corporate America, Fiorina has also earned a reputation as one of the most hated CEOs in American history according to a 2005 article in CNNMoney. In that article, CNN reported that her ouster from Hewlett-Packard resulted from the merger she engineered with arch-competitor Compaq in 2002, which resulted in the loss of more than half of the net worth of the world’s biggest computer company by 2005, while at the same time “offshoring” more than 30,000 American jobs. While she was fired by her board of directors for those failures, she should have been fired for destroying the corporate culture at HP which, until Fiorina took over, was considered one of the best places to work in the United States.

Having failed at HP, she decided that she would make a good United States Senator from California, so she ran against the redoubtable Barbara Boxer in 2010 and lost by a staggering 10% margin while spending a total of $6.5 million of her own money on the campaign and managing to alienate her own campaign staff in the process. According to Reuters, 12 of approximately 30 former Fiorina campaign workers have said they would not sign on for her presidential campaign because they were not paid for their work in 2010 until just before Fiorina announced her presidential aspirations. One ex-staffer said that he would rather go to Iraq than go to work for Fiorina again. Note to the Republican Party: Campaign staffers get to know their candidate better that the public ever does. When they talk about their candidate like this, pay attention, because something is wrong.

Then there’s Donald Trump, the ubiquitous, irrepressible and, in his own mind, inevitable candidate who believes the Birther myths about Barack Obama, and claims to have proof which he has never deigned to actually present to anyone (presumably because it doesn’t exist.) He uses the word “I” more often than any other candidate in living memory. (Note to Trump: If you listen closely, Donald, you may notice that real candidates never speak in the singular. They always speak in the plural, saying “we” rather than “I.”) The fact that Trump doesn’t understand that a presidency is the result of a collective effort means that he lacks the most basic requirement for a president: he doesn’t really understand the job.

Trump has very serious financial resources. He is far and away the wealthiest person ever to run for president, and he could be the first person to actually buy the presidency, lock, stock and barrel, but that would also be the end of American democracy as we know it. It is bad enough when major Republican donors such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson attempt to buy elections but, when the candidates themselves have enough money to buy the presidency outright, the checks and balances of the political party system collapses, and we are left with rule by fiat (by an individual) rather than by a party with a platform that reflects a collectively agreed upon agenda.

Becoming president is a simple two-step process for Trump. First, he buys the Republican party by buying his way through the primaries. Then, he can buy the election by saturation bombing advertising campaigns without ever going on the stump. The problem with a Trump presidency is simply that the man – who has declared bankruptcy four times during his business career – has absolutely no professional or personal qualifications for the job.

Being president isn’t like being the chief executive officer of a corporation. If you are a CEO, you can point your finger and say, “Go,” and people go. People come when they are beckoned, and do whatever you tell them to do. Being president is different because everyone you deal with as the president of the United States is a person with their own constituencies and their own power bases. They do not come and go at the president’s beck and call.

The last time the United States elected a president who had never been elected to anything before, it was Dwight David Eisenhower, but Ike had the unique distinction of having been the commander-in-chief of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, a job that most definitely qualified him to become the Chief Executive Officer of the United States of America. Before Ike, who did a pretty good job, the Republicans elected two men with no previous political experience, Herbert Hoover, whose economic policies ushered in the Great Depression, and Ulysses S. Grant who, like Ike and George Washington, had been the commander-in-chief of the Armies of the United States before becoming president.

None of the “non-political” candidates have the sand to stand up to Vladimir Putin. This isn’t “reality television,” Mr. Trump; this is reality itself you are dealing with now. There are no commercial breaks, no re-takes, and no stunt men to take the falls for you. The other two non-political candidates can be written off. They aren’t going anywhere. but Donald Trump might be the fly in the ointment for both the Republican party and for the nation. Imagine the star of “The Apprentice” going jaw to jaw with Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu. Now that would be reality television.

There are two more potential candidates waiting in the wings, Ohio Governor John Kasich, 63, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, 47, who is scheduled to officially announce his candidacy later this month. Kasich is an afterthought without a following. Walker is a serious contender for the nomination, but he’s really running for vice president, not for the top spot. Four others have recently indicated an interest but, if your hat isn’t already in the ring by the end of July, you might as well keep it on your head. This is the lineup, then, for the Republican nomination. Read’em and weep.

All images courtesy of Wikipedia under Creative Commons