Well, it is. I’ve got my pundit hat on, and my pundit PJs, and I’m saying the Republican nomination is Fla. Sen. Marco Rubio’s to lose.
Big Chris Christie—big, fat Chris Christie, as we say down south—may have just put the last nail in Jeb Bush’s coffin when he came out against the “Common Core” nationwide educational testing program. New Jersey had signed up for CC from the get-go, but now, no more. Common Core has officially become a “something we hate” among the Republican faithful, and Chris has abandoned ship, leaving poor Jeb out on a very lonely limb, and Jeb, well, he’s no Chris Christie, but he’s no lightweight either.
Jeb is also a hapless outlier on the immigration issue, still the very largest bee in the right-wing bonnet. And who can totally finesse that bee like a cute young Cuban who believes in America?
Rubio is, as he well knows, the anti-Bush. He isn’t connected with the past, and, post-Watergate, when Americans aren’t re-electing a president, they almost always go with the new guy. Washington is evil, right? Evil, evil, evil!
Moreover, all the bad things the Republicans want to say about Hillary you can say about Jeb, except that he isn’t married to Bill Clinton. Jeb thought he’d be able to finesse all that by sweeping the table in advance. As the “Establishment Candidate,” he’d be able to suck up all the Establishment cash, sitting on a billion-dollar Super PAC war chest while the other guys were still drawing up guest lists for hillbilly shindigs like thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners. A thousand dollars a plate? With caviar prices these days, you’re losing money!
Yeah, that was the way it was supposed to work out. But these days, there are just too damn many Republican billionaires. Rubio was also supposed to have destroyed himself back in 2015, when he stupidly tried to actually do something about immigration. But that was a long time ago, and, anyway, he’s cute. The Republican right wing luvs minorities who say exactly what they’re supposed to, and I think Rubio’s figured that out. For Republicans, being a minority doesn’t entitle you to be different; it requires you to be the same. Jeb Bush, the fat, old white guy in the race, may have to run awfully hard just to make it look close.
Afterwords
We Democrats can take (some) comfort in the fact that the road to the Republican nomination is a long one, and there are a lot of powerful egos in Marco’s way. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker feels he’s earned the nomination, unlike the Florida pretty boy. Chris Christie and Jeb Bush both feel that America needs them to be president, but they simply don’t realize how “moderate” they are. They’re boardroom boys who’ve never shopped at Wal-Mart. Ted Cruz is likely to end up as “the other Cuban,” and Rick Perry, “the dumber Texan.” Rand Paul, after feinting clumsily to the Republican “center,” has moved defiantly left, and more power to him. But if Rand even comes close to winning, Bill Kristol will personally strangle him on live TV. So there’s that to consider.
