My 2008 Presidential Possibilities (Part 1)

A number of people have asked me why I am not only disappointed with the field of presidential hopefuls, but feel that many of them should be considered by voters to be "unelectable." And I believe that if either party had decided on a strong candidate, many of the other party's candidates would immediately seem unviable. It's the fact that both parties seem to want to nominate a candidate with extremely unpopular traits that makes them able to do it.

Now, ideally a situation like this would be good for the voters. We could get a superstar with one or two things that don't play well in the press and normally would label the person as "too risky." But instead we're getting fundamentally flawed candidates inferior to the fields in any primary I've seen in my lifetime.

Let's go through it candidate by candidate. The numbers I'll be using are from a recent USA Today-Gallup poll, and carry a 5% margin of error.

I'll just do the Republicans for now. I'll handle the Democrats in a later post.

Rudy Giuliani (polling at 25%, down 9% in the past month) - Despite being the front runner, the Republicans should know better than to nominate him. He has plenty of skeletons in his closet, ranging from the serious to the wacky (like the time he floated the idea of forcing homeless people onto old retired cruise ships and sending them south for the winter). And The Onion was right; he'd essentially be running for president of 9/11. His policies are poorly thought out, and like most of the candidates, seems to be a Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

Mike Huckabee (polling at 16%, up 10% in the past month) - Despite the meteoric rise of this uber-religious zealot from Arkansas with what I personally think is a fantastic record on education, there is the problem of him being the uber-religious zealot from Arkansas. Furthermore, I suspect there should be some serious doubts about his ability to handle foreign policy or relate to people who aren't religious white Christians. And lastly there's the problem of being a Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

Fred Thompson (polling at 15% without significant change) - As the Capitol Steps said of a potential Thompson-Clinton race, "Law and Order is no match for a Desperate Housewife." He'd be an actor as a president, delivering other peoples' speeches, ideas and plans. He'd be a party puppet, and lack not only the gravitas we should require of a president (and that we have sorely missed the past 7 years) but also the trust of the people. I can't think of a single original idea that's come from him. In addition to being a Bush clone on a lot of policy issues, he's filled in the rest of his platform with smaller cloning operations.

John McCain (polling at 15% without significant change) - If he had stuck to his image of being the common-sense loving self-made man from the school of hard knocks (aka POW camp) who answered to no authority but his own morals and conscience, he'd have a shot. Voters wouldn't care that he's been about the third most conservative voter in the senate for most of his career there; they'd remember the few high profile issues on which he diverged from the party and turned into political capital and trust. And he's also the only candidate who seems to value national security over looking tough (such as his position on torture, which he admits is not a reliable means of extracting information while hurting our efforts to get other countries to extradite terrorists to us so we can ask them questions in the first place). BUT, he had to declare himself to be a "Bush Republican" making him, yup, you guessed it, just another Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

Mitt Romney (polling at 12% without significant change) - Though I admire his views on religion, and think that the separation of church and state should be in our hearts and minds as well as our laws (after all, if we demand a specific faith from a candidate we're just asking to get lied to a lot), I haven't heard him make sense on any issue yet. Also, where's his base? His only qualifying experience is in a state that's in a region that has very little shot of voting for him. In a normal year, the Republicans wouldn't dream of running a Mormon who didn't have anything really original to say anyway. His unelectable attributes stand out while his party-line attributes make him just another Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

And what's wrong with being a Bush clone? How about the fact that this past month his approval rating has skyrocketed to all of 37%, and his approvals haven't been higher than his disapprovals in well over a year (maybe longer; I don't have data on hand going back that far).

No other Republican is polling above 4% at the moment.