Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal are going to be announcing their candidacies this week. That brings the number of candidates to eleven (I think). Maybe a bit too many.
Ishii
There’s even too many "Rick"s (you can only vote for one*).
** In Chicago, where I was born … this is considered sweetly naive.*
Actually there are quite a number of advantages to this big field. I consider it like “March Madness” at this point (the 64+ teams that begin the NCAA basketball tournament).
Those first games are very exciting, even though many of the small schools are considered to have no chance to win the whole thing. One of the best games of this spring was UC Irvine (with its 7’6" center!) playing traditional power Louisville down to the last second in the first round IMO.
Very soon the field is thinned (in both events, primaries, NCAA) and while getting there is still much of the “fun” … a champion is crowned eventually.
With so many candidates, the GOP’s “enemies” cannot concentrate fire so easily on just one candidate. For instance, if they ramp up a big campaign against, say, Jeb Bush (not officially even running yet) … they could waste a lot of time and money.
At this point, most of the media still predicts a Hillary coronation, and so Hillary is catching flak from many of the GOP candidates directly.
I did get a laugh out of some media liberals’ comment that it looked like a GOP “clown car” (for those readers not familiar with the old circuses, a staple joke was to have a clown drive a tiny car around the ring, stop above a trap door, get out, and be followed by a seemingly never ending chain of clowns “coming from the car”).
http://media.caranddriver.com/image...ure-car-and-driver-photo-386399-s-450x274.jpg
Candidates will drop out after each primary … but before they do, many may take a swing at important issues with more courage than usual as they try to hit that home run that keeps them alive. This is good for our country IMO.
I’m already enthused that (for me) there are more candidates who come closer to my views than in the past 8 years, and maybe 16 or 20! Some are saying that the GOP has “a strong bench” (slang for backup candidates if the “leader” falters). And that the DNC so far has not much to back up a Hillary flop or departure.
usnews.com/opinion/blogs/lara-brown/2015/03/27/democrats-thin-bench-could-hurt-2016-senate-chances
*** - “strong/weak bench” is also applied to 2016 Senate Candidates.
*
As this is a Santorum thread … in his week or so of candidacy, he’s put a lot of interesting views on the table and has addressed a wide array of issues. Some candidates opt to be mysterious (and sometimes that works … Obama 2008 was like that … he was so vague per specifics, one could imagine that he agreed with them in the meantime). Others are very specific with position papers on everything. Santorum is more of the latter so far.
