Is There Anyone Who Won't Run for the Republican Nomination in 2016?

By Jeb Lund, Guardian UK

19 May 15

From old reliables like Sarah Palin to one-time darlings like Bobby Jindal, everyone seems to think this is their year ... to earn a Fox News contract

f you are over 35 and a Republican, you are allowed one (1) free presidential campaign announcement. It’s like the coupon for a free waxpaper cup of Pepsi at a church picnic: you just get one for showing up. These are the rules, which is why, in the next few weeks, everyone else in the Republican Party will launch their campaign to not become president of the United States, because it is their right.

But after all the legitimate major contenders for the nomination (if not the presidency), we’re now left with the unappealing oddments, the candidate-shaped things that make you go, “What the fuck is that?” This section of the Republican presidential candidacy spread is like the items at the salad bar that you’ll never put on your plate, but there they are, at the end, between the baskets of Saltines and the plastic jugs of ranch, Thousand Island and whatever-turned-into-bleu-cheese dressing.

Who or what the hell are these people? And why?

If you at any point in your life took a civics course, you are probably tempted to say that these are serious people who see the challenges facing America and are committed to making a positive difference for everyone. I was once like you. Now I just want to pet your face and look sad. In fact, that would be your thought process if you were to run for president, because you are a good person who feels normal things. I love you, and it’s going to be OK.

Unfortunately, here is an updated, realistic list of reasons why these remaindered-bin people from the Republican Party are running for president:

• They’re auditioning for a seven-figure commentator’s contract at Fox News.
  


• They’re going through an elaborate, performative book tour for a ghost-written paperweight they spent all of three hours dictating vague material for, to be sold at $24.99 a pop.


• They’re auditioning for a senior cabinet position.


• They’re driving up their speaker’s fee for corporate conferences.


• They’re raising a giant war chest for some other future project.


• They’re trying to drive the presidential election discussion further toward the fringe.

Those last two probably apply to Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina. There are many reasons he will not become president: that his name is Lindsey is as good as any, but there are also those persistent rumors that the lifelong bachelor is still in the closet (for the record, he told The New York Times “I ain’t gay”). Graham might also fancy himself the more reasonable candidate for Secretary of State (or Defense) than mustachioed war walrus John Bolton. He doesn’t have a chance at the nomination – not just because his “persistent bachelorhood” will send values voters reeling toward the fainting couches and not just because he seems to think climate change isn’t imaginary. What’s most damning is that even Republicans think he has no chance, and he doesn’t seem to be trying hard organizationally to roll back that assumption. Instead, he’s doing what he always does, drive American bellicosity further right into blood-streaming-down-the-walls crazy. Sunday morning, for instance, Graham said that if you’re even “thinking about joining al-Qaida or Isil, I’m not gonna call a judge. I’m gonna call a drone and we’re gonna kill you.” Graham has always been someone who gives you the impression that the name he asks the barista to put on his cup at Starbucks is just a unilateral statement of American military aggression, but this most recent pronouncement was an insane first for him: we reserve the right to murder you for your thoughts.

From the self-promotional wing of the party come the OGs of political brand leveraging, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. Palin periodically emits the proper harrumphing noises about getting back into the campaign game to set America straight, but she hated campaigning the last time she did it, then quit her job as governor before her term was up and now mostly delivers the same speech at CPAC and the Values Voter Summit every year with some laugh lines changed. Look for her to keep harrumphing about running until she can roll out a new patriotic cookbook or something called Memorial Day Moose Burrito: This Hot Tamale Stirs the Melting Pot with a Gun Barrel and tries to get a few more subscribers to her vertically integrated online empire in order to cover Bristol’s wedding reception. The Donald, on the other hand, will try to increase his negotiating leverage with NBC by pointing to all the people who tune in to see him “tell it like it” is on a fake show and will probably try to sell a few more seats in his scam college, assuming the whole thing isn’t in a joint FBI/SEC warehouse by now.

Bobby Jindal is running. Bobby Jindal is also polling worse in the (very) red state of which he is governor than Barack Obama. You’d expect better from a man who’s toed the line of every birther assertion since 2009, aped the conservative “kill ‘em all” foreign policy, come to the defense of corporate discrimination against gays, demanded we repeal Obamacare and anything like a graduated income tax and farmed out the state educational system to anyone with a Bible and two sticks to rub together at the base of a stake a woman is tied to. The best thing you can say about Bobby is that he fails to meet even low expectations. Bobby is probably angling very hard for a six-figure consultant salary from a think tank named The Values Liberty Tradition Foundation for America, USA.

Chris Christie and Rick Perry would both like that job, if only because it will offset the legal fees they will incur from their current jobs as man-whose-political-career-is-over-because-he-testifies-in-court-for-a-living. Perry will go further in the primary season because Christie is walking around in a sad tornado of potential indictments, like Pig Pen from Peanuts surrounded by clouds of blue paper left by process servers. Also, Perry is an attractive man from a large red state and benefits from the virtue of ignorance; Christie’s know-it-all bully schtick prevents him from getting away with claiming he was unaware of what was happening among his own advisors. Perry, however, is such an affable-seeming twit that it would surprise nobody if he got tricked into signing over the deed to his house to a wisecracking cartoon rabbit. In fact, he’s so thoroughly dumb that the national press actually discussed his wearing glasses as a sign of seriousness. If he’d worn a pocket protector, Joe Scarborough might have argued that we should have Perry build America “a cooler space shuttle.”

Rick Santorum, whose last name became a contest-winning term for post-sexual anal discharge, will declare his candidacy May 27. You might remember him from his low lusty dog-whistling on the 2012 campaign trail, where he likened Obama to “Islamism” and synonymized “people on welfare” with “black people” – an unsubtle tactic he’s updated for 2015 by talking about “unwed fathers” as “sexual predators”. Though he’s careful not to affix a racial identity to these baby daddies, he doesn’t have to with his audience. Santorum is actually a gifted public speaker, able to connect emotionally with his audience, and he’s much smarter than the average member of the Republican field. The problem is what he does with that talent. He talks a good game about economic populism, but as a committed free-marketer, he can’t advocate doing anything to create it. He is probably the smartest Republican candidate on foreign policy, but his solution is to “bomb Isis back to the seventh century,” which happens to be where his sexual politics stopped evolving. Also, despite being a solid runner-up in 2012, he’s emerged in 2015 not as the presumptive nominee but polling in ninth place (out of nine) in the state he represented in the US Senate before being clobbered by a 18-point margin. Who knows, maybe a few weeks on the campaign trail and he can get some more investors for his movie-making empire.

I could also get into the reputed interest of former New York governor George Pataki, but the fact that I forgot about George Pataki for nearly an hour after finishing the first draft of this should tell you everything you need to know about George Pataki’s chances.

Lastly, there’s Ohio governor John Kasich. After flirting with it early in his tenure, Kasich has backed away from what you might call the George W Bush/Sam Brownback theory of governance which is that, once elected, you are the representative of only the citizens who voted for you, and everyone else can take a hike. In backing away, Kasich not only accepted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, bringing healthcare to over 300,000 people, he framed his decision as part of a Christian imperative to aid the sick and the poor. In the modern Republican Party, it is generous to merely describe his political generosity to his poorer constituents as a slight problem for the conservative base – and that’s before they realize that the one-time union buster even won union endorsements in his last race.

Kasich probably has zero chance of winning the Republican nomination, and, all things considered, the Republican Party probably wants to find any excuse to keep him a minimum of 1,000 feet from a debate stage at all times. Then he can slink back home to run a large state in a semi-responsible manner.

In the meantime, we can watch every other presumptive nomination failure use their appeals to public service to leverage their multi-platform public/private identities into a monetized national thinksperience. God bless us, every brand.