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It's been a rollercoaster week in the political world, beginning with Hillary Clinton shifting the gears of her campaign by holding her first big rally, which was immediately followed by the man we're going to call "Jeb! Bush!" finally officially announcing his own candidacy.
When the 2016 presidential campaign season began earlier this year, I started writing articles about every candidate when they officially announced their candidacies. I made a promise in many of these columns, that I would take each candidate seriously no matter what I personally thought their chances of winning were, or how much I agreed or disagreed with their platform. I promised not to be snarky, above all. I think that running for president is a serious business, and even though it does occasionally include what I would call "not really serious" candidates, I still wanted to give a measure of respect to each entrant to the race at the very start of their campaign. As I put it repeatedly, there will be plenty of time for being snarky later (usually on Fridays, of course).
Today, Jeb Bush formally entered the race for the Republican nomination for president. I should point out, as a bit of personal trivia, that his new campaign logo ("Jeb!") has allowed me to create what I believe is the shortest headline I have ever written (in over 2,000 blog posts).
We begin with a story which is just ripe for mixing a few metaphors: The Iowa Republican Party just announced today that they are cancelling the Iowa Straw Poll.
I have to pity the poor mainstream media reporters covering Hillary Clinton's campaign, a tiny bit. No, no, I really do -- at least a smidgeon. They know full well that, barring any large and unforeseen events, they'll be covering Clinton's campaign for at least the next eight or nine months without having much of any "horserace" story to tell. If Clinton does as expected (again, barring a tremendous surge by Bernie Sanders or a sudden health problem for Hillary), she's going to become the Democratic nominee for president without much problem. This presents a deep quandary for the mainstream Clinton reporters, since all pundits (and I definitely include myself in this) absolutely love writing horserace stories. They're easy, they're poll-driven, and much like their namesake horseraces, it's always fun to see a dark horse pull into the lead or a frontrunner stumble or any other thrilling racetrack development that gets the heart pumping and the juices flowing. To put it another way: horserace stories are easy to write, which is why we get so many of them during each election.
Perry is the tenth Republican to throw his hat in the 2016 ring, joining Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Rick Santorum. There are at least five other Republicans who will also likely make a run for their party's nomination, but they have yet to formally announced their candidacies.
We really wanted to use a different subtitle for today's column, one we are actually astonished that more news organizations didn't go with, given Rick Perry's announcement of his second run for the White House. That headline, of course, would have been: "Oops, He Did It Again!" Now, we do realize that the Britney Spears album is actually 15 years old (how time flies, eh?), but even so, with "Oops" being so central to defining Perry on the national stage, it certainly seemed like an obvious choice.
We continue our running series of taking a serious look at all the announced candidates for president with two new entries this week, one from each side of the aisle. Republican Lindsey Graham made his formal announcement earlier in the week, and today Democrat Lincoln Chafee is also set to announce his candidacy.
We're going to begin today with a rather loaded question. How much attention do you think the media should be paying towards a presidential nominee who is right now getting 13 to 15 percent support in public opinion polls of their party's voters?
Two things are worth noting here, before I jump in to taking a serious look (as I am doing for all announced presidential candidates from both parties) at the chances Martin O'Malley has of becoming president.