The Running of the Bull: Today’s 2016 GOP Presidential Primary News

July 7, 2015 JanF Election 2016, News and Opinion 7

The annual San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain known as The Running of the Bulls often features accidental gorings as thousands of sanity-challenged people run alongside the fighting bulls in the streets of the village.

In America, we have the 2016 Republican Presidential Primary where the running of the bull is not restricted to 9 days in July but started in January 2015 with the Steve King Iowa Pigslop and will last 543 long painful days until the Republicans crown a “winner” at their national convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016.

As of today, there are 14 announced candidates and 2 waiting to jump into the fray. One of those two, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, is trying to ratchet up the enthusiasm by releasing his logo over 9 days … one day at a time (hello? is your PR person a 13 year old girl???). It started out with what looks like a toilet plunger in the lower right hand corner and here it is 4 days in … with yesterday’s “piece” unveiled on Twitter:

There were several guesses made as to how the logo would end up and this one, while lacking in madd photoshop skillz, looks juuuust riiiiight:

Today’s question: how do you include 10 candidates on one debate stage without the debate looking ridiculous?

What’s gained from what veterans of past mass gabfests variously describe as a circus, a cattle call or a hot mess?

A big field does not allow in-depth discussion of issues — “these are debates for the age of Twitter,” said Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer — and encourages grandstanding and showboating by candidates desperate for attention.

HAHAHAHAHA!!! As if “grandstanding” and “showboating” are somehow different than what we have been seeing on a daily basis from this group!!!!

Here is one suggested format – the “Cutoff Ten” are highlighted:

But the short answer is: You cannot possibly avoid them looking ridiculous! But it does not really matter whether it ends up being a “circus, a cattle call or a hot mess” – all you really need to know is one word “LOSER“.

7 Comments

  1. Today, Marco “Loser” Rubio will speak about the economy in Chicago in an attempt to separate himself from the pack.

    The right-wing press is quite sad because he is not focusing enough on Tax Cuts for the Wealthy – while he proposed cutting the corporate tax rate he dared to include tax cuts for families!

  2. Charlie Pierce:

    “There’s already intense infighting over how to keep the big stage from looking like a third-rate carny freak show.

    ‘California-based Republican donor John Jordan said Monday GOP leaders should take steps to block Trump’s access to the first presidential debate in early August. Organizers at Fox News, backed by the Republican National Committee, have released guidelines allowing the top 10 candidates in national polling to participate. Trump would qualify under the current terms, while contenders such as Ohio’s two-term governor, John Kasich, would not.’

    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a36229/there-is-no-republican-party-debates/

  3. Ed Kilgore:

    For [the candidates on the bubble], the big strategic question is whether throwing a bomb or three in late July to make the Fox debate cut is worth the long-term risk of self-marginalization. The alternative is to accept a place at the kiddie table “forum” earlier on August 6 and hope media, activists, donors and party elites don’t mentally strike one’s name from the insanely long list of contenders. I’m guessing most of these birds will not want to take that chance. Get ready for some serious gyring and gimbling in late July.

    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_07/get_ready_for_some_late_july_g056442.php

  4. Sean Illing, at Salon…..

    Fox News –and the conservative media-industrial complex – have created a Frankenstein. His name is Donald Trump, and his political success is now a huge problem for the Republican Party. In so many ways, Trump’s political existence was inevitable. For years, Fox News and the conservative talk radio machine have played to the populist Tea Party id: fomenting fear, demonizing immigrants, and enabling every nativist anxiety imaginable. Now they’re paying the price.
    ~snip~
    Conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, is dead in this country. Sure, there are intelligent conservative voices in the whirlwind, but they’ve been overwhelmed by the xenophobic hysteria peddled by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. These are the people who define conservatism today. These are the people who’ve poisoned the conservative brand, made it synonymous with backwardness and cultural isolation. And Fox News has been their most significant stage, the ultimate echo chamber.

    As a consequence, conservatives (on the whole) are now dumber, angrier and more divorced from the facts. To the extent that Fox News has nurtured the idiocy Trump represents, they’re responsible for his political life – they made it possible. The bile spewed by Trump might as well be Fox News talking points; it’s the kind of garbage you hear every day on their programs. And because so many conservatives get their news from Fox, Republican policymakers are forced to parrot those arguments to voters. This plays well with the base, but it alienates most of the country – as it should.

    http://www.salon.com/2015/07/08/fox_news_built_a_fked_up_frankenstein_dumb_angry_and_divorced_from_facts_now_donald_trump_will_devour_them/

    • Excellent piece! Thank you.

      From Sean’s lips to everyone’s ears:

      This plays well with the base, but it alienates most of the country – as it should.

      A poll I saw this morning shows that the Republican Party has a minority view on most every issue these days: same-sex marriage, immigration, war.

      Conservatism was killed by allowing the John Birch wing, the Kochs and Aileses, decide on the litmus tests. They tapped into the Southern white male anger over just about everything, giving a megaphone to birthers and racists and tenthers. The inevitable result was to shrink their party small enough to fit inside the reptilian brain of the average Fox viewer.

      Good riddance.

  5. One more Republican entered the fray, making it 17. @darth said that, sadly, he cannot fit more than 16 into his Hollywood Squares. Sorry, Jim Gilmore!

    Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore will be the latest Republican to enter the ever-growing field of White House candidates.

    Gilmore told the Richmond Times-Dispatch Tuesday that he will jump in. Gilmore was governor from 1998 to 2002, served as Republican National Committee chairman in 2001 and lost Virginia’s 2008 U.S. Senate race to then-Gov. Mark Warner in a blowout.

    The Times-Dispatch reports that Gilmore will formally announce his candidacy early next month. He told the paper that he doesn’t believe other Republicans are addressing major national security concerns.

    Sounds like he will go toe-to-toe with Lindsey Graham who is the self-identified foreign policy candidate. There is always room for one more Bomb-Bomb-Iraner as it makes the Republicans look even more out of touch with everyone else in the country.

  6. Here is an interesting piece on “electability” and the weakness of the “I won in Purple States” brag:

    … what do we actually know about which of these 17 would be the strongest general election candidate? Which of these 17 could compete and win in the nine battleground states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin) that will likely determine the 2016 election? Which of the 17 could expand the playing field into states like Michigan or Pennsylvania?

    There’s lots to take into account when answering that question—but the partisan composition of the electorate is the single most important factor in American elections.

    Some of the candidates have never faced anything other than reliable red state voters and some who have, have only won in off-year elections:

    Six of the Republican contenders (Cruz, Graham, Huckabee, Jindal, Paul, and Perry) are from states that are reliably red—and have never faced electorates that would have the partisan distribution they would encounter in purple states. Two of them (Carson and Trump) have never ever faced any electorate whatsoever and one (Fiorina) ran and lost in a blue state.

    Five (Bush, Gilmore, Kasich, Rubio, and Walker) have won statewide elections in purple states, and three GOP contestants have won statewide contests in blue states (Christie, Pataki, and Santorum).

    But …. and it is big one:

    But, even for those purple and blue state winners, presidential year electorates are fundamentally different than mid-term electorates. Presidential electorates are less white, younger, and more Democratic than mid-term electorates. […]

    There are two Americas when it comes to mid-term year electorates and presidential year electorates and while Republicans have enjoyed great success in recent mid-terms, the eventual nominee will need to attract or disproportionally mobilize a significant chunk of those citizens who only cast their ballots in presidential election years. Who votes is the most fundamental question in understanding who wins, and none of the Republicans have faced the “who” that will decide the 2016 election—presidential election year only voters in purple states.

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