Too Bad Jeb Was Good

Jeb Bush (with or without last name) made a fine debut speech at Miami Dade College Monday, right up there with Marco Rubio’s several weeks ago. Must be something in the Florida water. (Manatees?)  They were both far better than the stultified, rigid Hillary, who can’t even quote The Beatles without sounding like a schoolmarm teaching Wordsworth to third graders.  (Talk about “Yesterday”!)

Problem is,  as I wrote in late May, I still wish Jeb wasn’t running.  I had  reasons then and they haven’t gone away — and this is with no offense to the former governor who, for all I know, could be the best potential president currently running from either party.

The overwhelming issues for me are democracy itself and defeating Hillary Clinton.  Enough already with royal families.  Are we Argentina?  This is the USA (still… maybe…).  Sure politics can be a family business like anything else, but there are limits. And the presidency is one of them, indeed the most important of them. Pace the Adams Family (the original one, not the one with two d’s) it’s not a good idea to have two or more members of the same family in the presidency.  Ditto husbands and wives.  Then we will really be Argentina in more ways than one.

Besides interfering with my admittedly idealized vision of democracy,  I think Jeb, well financed as he is, is poorly positioned to defeat that American Eva Perón without the beauty, Hillarita.  It’s not just that he loses the advantage that other candidates would have — the enough of the lying Clintons already thing. Many voters, particularly those of no hard ideological persuasion, the vaunted swing voters, low -information folks that they mostly are, remember the original Clinton era as a time when they were better off than the Bush era.  (Never mind that W had to deal with 9/11.  We’re talking low-information folks, here.  With short memories, if any.)

Now it should be obvious, but I’ll state it anyway, that should he be nominated, I will vote for Jeb in a heartbeat, with pleasure.  The same goes for every single one of the other Republican candidates, even some I like a lot less than Jeb.  It’s just in this election above all in our lifetimes, in the immortal words of UCLA football coach “Red” Sanders, “Winning isn’t everything.  It’s the only thing!”

And don’t forget that as you get embroiled in all the domestic issues that may or may not separate the candidates.  We are on the brink of losing Western Civ, folks.  All the rest is what is known in Yiddish as “bubbameise,” grandmother chatter. Don’t believe me?  Check out this… or this… or this… all chosen within twenty seconds, almost at random.

Meanwhile, “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow” is so passé.  I have a recommendation for a great campaign song for Hilary that’s very apropos — “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”  If you don’t remember the lyrics, just check out the YouTube above.  They’re so apropos.

UPDATE:  Latest poll of Republican voters from Monmouth University shows no clear leader in the presidential race, but national security far and away the number one concern (bad news for Rand Paul?) with gun control second. Social issues declining in importance.