Which GOP candidate would be the best President?
I’ve spent a few weeks thinking about how bad the GOP field is, but I haven’t turned the table upside down to think about which candidate would be a better President than the others. Obviously, we’d be talking about shades of differences…mere whips of perceived virtues where no real virtue abides. But let’s give it a go, shall we?
First off…Jeb Bush is better than the field because he appears to be a grown up. I also think he’d be chastened by the myriad fuck ups of his idiot brother.
Rand Paul is next. He is better than Scott Walker. They are both creepy narcissists, but Rand Paul’s creepy narcissism seems like the kind of narcissism that might allow him to take advice from grown ups. Scott Walker, unfortunately learned all the wrong lessons from having survived his recall and now actually thinks of himself as a genuine hard-ass willing to “make the tough calls” and go against public opinion because “fuck it.”
And yet, Scott Walker is better than Chris Christie, who is both A creepy narcissists and a blow hard who REALLY believes that he is the tough guy America needs right now. As demonstrated by his governorship of New Jersey, Christie would not be constrained by anything. Decency? Common Sense? Reality? C’mon… those are for pussies. He’s got the swagger of a drunken oaf who has never hung around long enough to see all the cleanup that his drunken oafishness requires. And yet, he is still better than the next tier of candidates, the religious whackjobs like Mike Huckabee, who is slightly better than the other religious whackjobs.
Next in this series… which religious whackjobs would be better at being President than the other religious whackjobs.
Jeb Bush and Rand Paul are the only acceptable candidates. The election of anyone else on the Republican side will guarantee civil war and the apocalypse.
The better way to ask this is “Which GOP candidate would be the least terrible president?”
Basically, they are all the same candidate. It’s just some have different ways of expressing their points. Other than Rand saying he’s against going to war (and I strongly doubt he’d stick to that position if he were elected) I don’t see any policy differences between them. Can someone point these differences out? All I come up with is the difference between catering to the conservative agenda and loudly catering to the conservative agenda.
IMO, if any one of these candidates win, the agenda is the same. In fact, I think the ones viewed most “reasonable” are probably the most dangerous because the press will slap the “moderate” label on them and praise them for not being Ted Cruz – even though there’s really no policy difference between Cruz and Bush and Walker.
So… I can’t answer the question!
I think you’ll get better results on immigration policy from Bush or Rubio than from the other maniacs. Rand Paul the person is probably much more of a cautious libertarian than Rand Paul the candidate so he could potentially be pretty decent on drone policy, pot, criminal justice issues, &c. Chris Christie certainly doesn’t have the unctuous preacher vibe of Ted Cruz… (although CC has his own unique creepiness, just with much less Jesus).
I take your point though, P. This is all conjecture now. If you’re a progressive person who cares about income inequality, racism in the criminal justice system, women’s health issues, and a less aggressive and bloody foreign policy then you basically have copy/paste GOP candidates. The subtle variances basically make very little difference.
I guess I would have to say Bush, for your stated reason that he appears to be the only grown up.
Where are the Eisenhowers? Do they not exist?
I’m going to go with Rand Paul over Bush, primarily to answer pandora’s question. Here are the positions he either avows or has taken:
1. He was one of a handful of GOPers and the only presidential hopeful to vote about a week ago to extend sexual orientation protections to teenage runaways (that they couldn’t be discriminated against based on LGBT identity).
2. He’s consistently voted and argued to kill or gut the Patriot Act.
3. Whether or not you believe he’d do it, he’s the only candidate (on either side of the aisle) talking about scaling back US military operations abroad, and talking about ending the undeclared drone war on civilians. (He should at least get the point for talking about it.)
4. He’s much more realistic on immigration than anybody else on the GOP side with the possible exception of Bush.
5. His rhetoric says, “Cut the Department of Education.” Like Obama’s rhetoric said, “Close Gitmo,” that’s more a campaign/value statement than a promise that can be delivered. That said, I have little doubt that we’d see the end of Federal threats over high-stakes testing.
Of course he is a narcissist. Nobody who thinks they can convince 50+ million people to vote for them for President isn’t. But I do think Jeb Bush (whom I cannot tolerate for other reasons) and Rand Paul represent the only true “rational actors” among the current and likely GOP field, no matter how much one might disagree with their ideology. Not that I think Jeb actually has one, and I’m not real sure some days than Rand does, either.
That one is easy. Hillary Clinton.