Syndicated columnist and National Review editor Rich Lowry has written an opinion piece that has some Republicans buzzing nationally and in Florida. Referring to his own magazine's cover story on the former Florida Governor and heir to the Bush dynasty, Lowry writes that now, and not 2016, is the time for Bush to make his run for Presidency.
Lowry lists 8 different reasons why Bush should run, but the most relevant is the first one he posits: That it's an open GOP field with a vulnerable incumbent President in Barack Obama:
Rarely do you get such a convergence of a beatable incumbent president with a wide-open field to challenge him. Obama is slightly below 50 percent in the polls, with a real weakness in the middle of the country, and he’s saddled with a recovery that has yet to produce substantial job growth. Yet there is no true frontrunner in the race to challenge him. It’s hard to imagine an environment better suited for a heavyweight like Jeb to make a run.
This is key, and what I'd like to focus on in this post (Bush himself says he ain't gonna run).
When you see polls, are ask people who think about this, the name Mitt Romney comes to the top of the list, for understandable reasons. He's got money, he's better known than in 2008, he's got more followers, etc.
But of course he's got a lot of negatives, the most obvious one being the fact that in many ways his program to provide universal health care coverage in Massachusetts apes the legislation that Congressional Democrats and Obama passed last year. With the Republican Party really feeling like they've got some momentum in The Supreme Court killing (or severely weakening) the President's signature domestic achievement, the fact that Romney did a similar thing in the Commonwealth is going to be an ongoing problem for him.
An up and coming potential nominee is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday in which he at least sounds like a grown up. In the piece he suggests how the administration can correct/improve the plan. Daniels looks serious – though he's said in the past he's not intending to run.
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2011.