COMMENTARY
CHOICES- DEMOCRATS- SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS-REPUBLICANS- JUST THE DWARFS- SO HERE'S A BETTING PROPOSITION INSTEAD
FORGET REPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS AND GREENS! BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR SOCIALISM!
One of the few pleasures that someone like myself gets out of covering this ultimately dreary and meaningless 2008 presidential election cycle is the chance to make a few friendly wagers on various propositions. In the wake of last week’s political activities here is some background for my first betting proposition of the season.
Last week, the week of April 23, 2007, all of the announced Democratic Party presidential candidates met for what today passes as debate at South Carolina
State College. Make no mistake-the 2008 presidential election is strictly the Democrats to lose after the debacle of the Bush years. Under those terms the Democratic Party nomination very much means something this time. So what happened in South Carolina? Everyone made ‘nice’ (with the exception of anti-warrior/relic former Senator Mike Gravel). If President Bush and the Congressional leadership are doing a minuet over the Iraq War budget the Democratic candidates were doing a waltz. Nobody apparently stumbled but no one took any lead on anything, especially on Iraq. The leading candidates are all waiting to take over the war from Bush in 2009. That, my friends, is almost two years way. So much for the courage of the parliamentary opposition. These are not good times for anyone with a bold vision in American politics, except those who favor more jails, more bombs and more debt. Off the performances down South it looks to me like Hillary at 5/2 against the field. That is not for betting purposes. Yet.
And the Republicans? Rudy Guiliani apparently has too many wives. Mitt Romney has too few. (I would definitely have given the founder of Mormonism Joseph Smith, Mitt’s co-religionist, a careful look based on his politics in the 1840’s as a Free-Soiler. Even Mitt’s great-grandfather seems interesting with his five wives- now that is displaying executive ability. Poor Mitt is, however, just a poor cookie-cutter copy of what passes today for a standard brand Republican). And the latest official entry into the race, John McCain, is a toothless old hag. Anyone who in 2007 makes defense of the Iraq quagmire a central theme of his or her campaign truly suffers from a “ Manchurian Candidate” complex (meaning the original film version, not the more recent one starring Denzel Washington). Even the lackluster Democratic field looks like the Founding Fathers (oophs, Founders) compared to these guys. So what are the Republicans to do against the seeming Democratic lock on 2008? Well, how about Jeb Bush? Madness, you say. Hear me out, please.
After the mid-term 2006 elections I wrote, rather off-handedly I thought at the time, that the idea of a Hillary Clinton run at the presidency was too depressing to contemplate. I stated that any bourgeois republic that could do no better than to come up with a perennial Bush/Clinton dynastic quinella deserved all the trouble it got. And it does. However, since we are going to get Hillary anyway we might as well take Jeb Bush in the bargain. What the hell, the Republican strategy in 2008 has got to be to win the Southern states as usual, try to hold their own in the non- coastal West and fight it out in the Midwest. Old Jeb fits that strategy to a tee. He is suppose to be brighter than his brother (not a particularly hard thing to do) and ran Florida no worst than any previous governor. If the Republicans are going to have to run off of the decrepit Bush legacy anyway they might as well get the real thing. I think a Hillary/Jeb confrontation in 2008 is about 20-1 against now. Any takers?
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