It’s no secret that many conservatives and Republicans (and conservative Republicans) aren’t particularly happy with the slate of possible 2012 presidential candidates. There are limits to how much one can delude themselves into getting psyched about supporting Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney, whatever their merits.
And while one cannot emphasize enough how highly, highly entertaining Donald Trump is to watch and how incredible a gift to journalism it would be to have him run for president, he is as serious a political leader (not always an oxymoron) as Ed Schultz is an intellectual, Rebecca Black is a musician and the Olive Garden is a restaurant. Why, again, can’t conservatives have candidates they actually like?
We know who would bring excitement to the race: Chris Christie and Jeb Bush. But instead of these two juggernauts, we get Alex Jones’ favorite politician (Ron Paul) and a guy who is best known for losing to David Duke in a Republican gubernatorial primary (Buddy Ryan? Or is it Roemer?). Is this a joke?
We supposedly can’t have Jeb Bush because of his last name. I am not dense. I get it. After eight years of George W., Americans probably don’t want another Bush. It is no secret George. W. wasn’t that popular when he left office (though our current president is doing his darndest to rehabilitate his predecessor’s image). And it wouldn’t look good for a democratic republic like ours to have three presidents belonging to the same nuclear family in the span of just over two decades.
But are these really good reasons to deprive Americans of the choice of someone as qualified and as exciting a candidate as Jeb Bush? He can’t run because of his last name? Are we really willing to say as a country, “Yea, much rather America go to hell than have a guy who may be the best qualified for the job because of his name?”
(And again, his name is Jeb Bush, not Jeb Hitler. It’s not that bad.)
Jeb was a tremendously successful governor of Florida. Many believe he would be the best Republican candidate if it weren’t for the aforementioned name thing. Assuming he’s willing, how about we have him change his name to Jeb Tree and let him get in the Republican rumble, no?
Sadly, apparently no.
Then there is Chris Christie, arguably the most thrilling leader in Republican politics. He has shown that a politician can vigorously take on third rails and remain popular. He is unafraid to stand up to entrenched interests. He comes across as genuine and possesses more excitement in a single follicle of his hair than Mitt Romney does in his entire, robotic body.
But Christie says he is not ready to run, as if our greatest leaders were ever really perfectly ready to take command when their time came. Christie himself has said that if action to rein in our fiscal woes is not taken now, our last chance for action will be the next president, which he has tantalizingly suggested he would be if he ran, but nonetheless says he won’t and claims he will commit suicide if necessary in order to prove it. (To me, this borders on being unpatriotic.)
So Christie says not this cycle, maybe next cycle, even though he admits that the next cycle may be meaningless if action is not taken to clot America’s wounds before then. And even if that was not the case, if Christie loses to the wildly popular Democratic Newark Mayor Cory Booker in the next gubernatorial race, which is possible in Democratic New Jersey, his star will shatter and any presidential ambitious he might harbor will be imperiled.
So we are being forced as a country to accept that for reasons that may be momentarily compelling, but upon further examination utterly insignificant, we can’t have the people we really want running for president. And we can’t have these candidates at a time when America faces enormous challenges, both fiscally and internationally. When we have a president who is playing around with a budgetary butter knife when a chainsaw is necessary to fix our fiscal problems. When we have a president who has redefined to the word ‘lead’ to mean ‘follow,’ its antonym, as in “leading from behind.”
During these perilous times, when we need a leader as much as ever, when Americans are yearning for an alternative to a president who seems (the Osama bin Laden operation aside) to be in over his head, for some reason we seem to be getting the B-team of Republican candidates. I don’t know why (perhaps they just don’t want to, though that’s really not a good excuse), but there is no reason it has to be so. All Jeb and Chris have to do is say, “Screw it. I’m in!”