RUNNING for their LIVES
SIZING UP THE 10 LEADING CANDIDATES FOR THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION
If the GOP candidates were horses, racing touts looking at the current field would find a thoroughbred for every taste. You’ve got stretch runners, big out-of-the-gate movers and a few wildcards who could win it all or stumble in the first furlong. You’ve got young untested talent, sentimental favorites who are past their prime, one-time stars who have faded and one yugely over-priced stallion who likes to run in the mud.
And although it seems like the 2016 race started before President Obama was sworn in for his second term, it’s still very early in this process. At this point in 2007, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton were the inevitable nominees.
Before this is over, we’ll see a lot of changes in the Republican field, with today’s favorites falling back and long-shots pulling into the front of the pack. Then, as the primaries get underway and the national convention comes into focus, down the stretch they’ll come…
1. Donald Trump
Let’s get Trump out of the way first, because much like Trump’s net worth, there’s less here than meets the eye. Trump’s celebrity from his decades in the public eye and his reality-TV star charisma have given him the opportunity and skill set to tap into legitimate anger at the failures and dysfunctions in Washington. But the rise in his numbers is as much of a shell game as his supposed $10 billion fortune, which independent analysts say is closer to $3 billion.
As was on embarrassing display in Thursday night’s debate, Trump is a brash, ballsy brand. He’s got the answer to everything, and he is absolutely sure that everyone who challenges him is a loser. Just because.
The truth that Republican voters will soon come to terms with: Those who support the Donald are in love with the character he plays on TV, not the real man, and certainly not the Friend of Bill, backer of Barack and one-time fan of gun control, abortion and taxes Trump is in real life.
Eventually, Trump’s schtick will fade for a simple reason. We live in a short-attention-span media culture. Like the summer pop song you love in June and loathe by Labor Day, Trump is on the clock. The moment he is forced out of the role of cathartic entertainer and into the role of candidate with real ideas that are put up to serious scrutiny, he’ll be back to selling golf course memberships to credulous Midwest doctors and condos to Chinese oligarchs.
Post-debate outlook: Looked like a winner out of the gate, but sell now, while’s he still high.
2. Jeb Bush
The most remarkable thing about Jeb Bush is the ahistorical nature of how he’s portrayed today. For his eight years as governor, the Florida and national media had him on blast as an ultra-conservative who made John Birch look like Ted Kennedy. He was pro-life, pro-gun, anti-tax and pro-growth.
In the face of a deeply skeptical Republican electorate that needs strong reasons to pull the lever for another Bush, that’s the persona he needs to reclaim if he’s going to regain his frontrunner status.
Bush can’t disavow his positions on immigration, for solid generalelection reasons; the most he can do is mitigate the damage. But he does needs to categorically and unequivocally excise the cancer eating at the heart of his campaign: his robust support for Common Core standards, which conservatives hate nearly as much as they hate Obamacare.
It doesn’t matter what his intent was with Common Core in the beginning; at this point, it’s deadly. It pops up in every focus group with Republicans I’ve sat in for the last year. They hate it, and they profoundly distrust him because of it.
Bush’s brand is intellect, integrity and consistency, though, so don’t expect a reversal. Instead, look to choppy waters ahead.
Post-debate outlook: A warhorse from champion lines, but don’t bet the farm on him.
3. Scott Walker
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has a secret weapon in the GOP primary, and he’ll need it. It’s in the garage off his modest Milwaukee suburban home, tucked behind the snow blower: a Throne of Skulls built from the many enemies who have come at him in the last decade and lost. His deceptively aw-shucks, mild-mannered Midwesterner act hides a man who has beaten back everything the Democrats and their union allies could throw at him.
Like the guy who currently sits in the Oval Office, he’s tougher than he looks.
Walker will need that toughness, and soon, because while he hits almost all the right ideological buttons for the GOP — he started dismantling the Democratic-union-liberal industrial complex in Wisconsin, he’s strongly pro-life, he’s right on guns, and he’s a champion tax-cutter — he still hasn’t yet hit all the marks as a commanding presence in the GOP or the national stage. He needs to step up in the presence, rhetoric and presentation departments to get to the finals.
He’s solid, but in a crowded field, solid isn’t good enough.
Post-debate outlook: Good fundamentals, but beware an injury or a stumble.
4. Mike Huckabee
Smarmy and snide isn’t my version of Presidential, and it’s not the contemporary flavor of fighter Republican voters want. Huckabee is not particularity conservative outside of his traditional cluster of social issues, and he’s a terrible fundraiser. He’s too liberal on economic issues for the primary and too much of a prig in both affect and policy on social issues to win the general.
Huckabee’s is a vanity candidacy more about selling his next unreadable “fried chicken and grits” book of folksy aphorisms and tea-stained recollections than it is about winning the White House.
Post-debate outlook: Only strong on his turf and in carefully prepared sprints.
5. Ben Carson
Ben Carson has an audience and a following based on his inspirational personal story, his solid conservative beliefs and his outsider credibility. But he’s a doctor who’s never held public office or even managed a major organization running for President of the United States.
He hasn’t broken through with a selling proposition that will make him the nominee, and his campaign organization seems to lack the infrastructure and follow-through needed for victory.
Post-debate outlook: Write him off.
6. Ted Cruz
Cruz has been playing a dangerous game, drafting behind Donald Trump for three weeks now, hoping for Trump to implode so that he’ll be positioned to catch The Donald’s minions in his loving arms. Cruz is smart as hell, but this may be a bit too clever by half. As I told one of his advisers, “You can keep throwing meat at the alligator, but he’ll just eat you last.”
Cruz is arguably the most conservative horse in the field when it comes to the current slate of Tea Party issues, and he’s done well raising money in the super-PAC domain. In a Republican primary, that has its benefits.
His challenge is tonal. He has to find a way to be the smart conservative without being the snide conservative. He often sounds like an insurgent, not a leader, and his battles in the Senate have at times bordered on quixotic.
Post-debate outlook: Still an open question if he can convert smarts to speed and endurance.
7. Marco Rubio
Rubio is a personal favorite because, as a Florida political pro, I’ve seen his gifts and skills up close. He’s smart, quick, wellinformed and genuinely likeable. I saw him start out 60 points behind Charlie Crist in a run for U.S. Senate; he never quit, he never faltered and he never blinked at the overwhelming odds against him.
If there’s one candidate who makes Hillary Clinton reach for her Life Alert, it’s Rubio. She’s had a front-row seat to her husband Bill and her former boss Obama winning four national elections as young, charismatic leaders with an optimistic, prospective message. The fact she desperately and pathetically tries to invert his “party of yesterday” message in her stump speech illustrates her rising anxiety.
Hillary’s coalition needs to expand far beyond its base, and Rubio would make that really difficult by putting Hispanic votes in play. He isn’t just fluent in Spanish; he’s also fluent in the media culture of Univision and Telemundo, and can counterpunch in their language.
If he can fend off doubts about inexperience — learning from how Clinton did it in 1992 and Obama did it in 2008 — he can go the distance.
Post-debate outlook: The one to watch. He practically lapped the field with his answers and can easily do it again.
8. Rand Paul
Paul’s unique libertarian spot in the Republican pack comes not only from his iconoclastic style, but also from his father’s, um, colorful, history. Paul has inherited a portion of his father Ron’s passionate base, many of them isolationist and patently anti-Israel, which will hobble him in the current political climate. On the positive side of the ledger, Paul and has done some really interesting and smart work with criminal justice reform and race relations.
Unfortunately, Paul’s campaign all but ended the week under a cloud of investigations of his most senior campaign staff, and even before that it seemed he was limping along. He’s a misfit.
Post-debate outlook: From a lineage with a quirky runner, but likely can’t make the distance.
9. Chris Christie
Chris Christie is politically dead but too stubborn to lay down. His candidacy was always about his appeal to the Acela Corridor media elite, not GOP primary voters. His blowhard affect and evident contempt for conservatives did more to harm him than a year of Bridgegate stories.
As Christie got his ducks in a row, his presumed fundraising strength with Wall Street disappeared and landed in Jeb’s campaign accounts. He’s betting the whole thing on New Hampshire, but his odds are looking longer by the day.
In Thursday night’s debate, he had one helpful skirmish with Rand Paul — in which he made the case for aggressive antiterrorism intelligence collection. Otherwise, his performance was forgettable.
Post-debate outlook: He could catch fire, but unlikely.
10. John Kasich
Kasich has some very real strengths, but his demeanor repeatedly gets the better of him. Yes, he’s the governor of the vital swing state of Ohio, but the massive chip on his shoulder and his pinched expression makes him look like an angry actuary, not a President. He’s also an apostate on Obamacare — he’s the only one who doesn’t say he wants to tear it to shreds and start over — and tends to lecture the GOP base, which is not a recipe for success. His game plan is to hold on long enough to win Ohio. I think he’s overpriced even now, but his game plan is endurance, not adoration.
Post-debate outlook: his performance was better than expected, but he won’t wear well.
Wilson is a Republican admaker and message strategist not affiliated with any of the candidates.