On the Democratic side, former U.S. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has already launched an exploratory committee for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination — a race that’s expected to be dominated by former Secretary of State Clinton, a former first lady of Arkansas who went on to be elected to the Senate from New York.
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Yearly Archives: 2015
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham launches campaign for president
South Carolinian stresses national security and fighting Islamic extremism in kickoff speech
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham
CENTER, South Carolina (CFP) — Saying he wants America to have “security through strength,” U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham formally launched his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination by calling for stronger action against both Islamic extremism and Russian expansionism
“The next president must be an informed and decisive commander-in-chief, ready immediately to address these threats. We’ve learned over the past six years that speeches alone won’t make us safe. Superior power and resolve will,” he said.
“I am ready to be commander-in-chief on day one.”
Graham, 59, elected to his third term in the Senate last year, launched his campaign in Center, the small town in upstate South Carolina where he grew up living in back of a bar. He saluted people in his hometown who helped him climb from those humble origins to the Senate.
“I’m a man with many debts to my family, to you, to South Carolina and to the country,” Graham said. “I’m running for president to repay those debts, to fight as hard for you as you fought for me.”
Graham, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is considered something of a hawk on military and foreign policy. He has been particularly critical of one of his 2016 GOP opponents, U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has taken a less interventionist line when it comes to international relations.
In his kickoff speech, Graham reflected those views, saying that he wants to “defeat the enemies trying to kill us, not just penalize them or criticize them or contain them but defeat them.”
“Simply put, radical Islam is running wild,” he said. “They have more safe havens, more money, more weapons and more capability to strike our homeland than any time since 9/11. They are large, rich and entrenched. As president, I will make them small, poor and on the run.”
During his years in the Senate, Graham has come under fire from conservative forces in his own party for his willingness to make deals with Democrats. When he ran for re-election in 2014, he faced a primary challenge from four Tea Party-backed foes, which he won handily.
In his opening speech, Graham promised his fellow Republicans to “be a champion for limited and effective government,” but he also told Democrats that “on the big things, we share a common fate. I’ll work with you to strengthen the country we both love.”
“You’re not my enemy. You’re my fellow countrymen,” he said.
Should Graham the White House in 2016, he would be the first unmarried man elected to the nation’s top office since Grover Cleveland in 1884.
Graham is one of eight Southern Republican who have launched or are expected to launch presidential campaigns in 2016.
In addition to Paul, those already in the race include former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and U.S. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. The others expected to get in include Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and former governors Jeb Bush of Florida and Rick Perry of Texas.
Watch Graham’s presidential announcement:
Matt Bevin holds on to win Kentucky GOP governor’s primary
Failed U.S. Senate candidate defeats State Agriculture Commissioner James Comer by just 83 votes
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
LOUISVILLE (CFP) — Just a year after being crushed by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a GOP Senate primary, Louisville businessman and Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin has held on to a razor-thin 83-vote lead to win Kentucky’s GOP gubernatorial primary.
Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin
State Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, who narrowly trailed Bevin in the May 19 vote, had asked for a recanvas. But after the recanvas didn’t change the outcome, Comer conceded on May 29, opting not to ask for a recount.
Bevin will now face the Democratic nominee for governor, Attorney General Jack Conway, in November.
Bevin and Comer both took 33 percent of the vote to 27 percent for former Louisville Councilman Hal Heiner and 7 percent former Supreme Court Justice Will Scott.
Kentucky abolished its primary runoff in 2008, which means Bevin comes out of the primary with just a third of the vote.
Near the end of the race, Comer’s campaign was rocked by abuse allegations from a former college girlfriend, which he denied. Heiner apologized after the blogger who publicized the allegations acknowledged that he had spoken about them with the husband of Heiner’s running mate for lieutenant governor.
The election result was a political comeback for Bevin, 48, who jumped into the governor’s race just hours before the filing deadline.
Bevin, 48, challenged McConnell in 2014 the backing of outside Republican groups critical of the senator’s leadership, including the Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks. But in the end, McConnell won easily with more than 60 percent of the vote and went on to win a sixth term in November.
Despite the bitterness of that race, McConnell stayed out of Bevin’s primary fight.
Although Kentucky has become a reliably Republican state at the federal level, the party has only won the governorship once in the last 44 years. The current governor, Democrat Steve Beshear, is term limited.
Kentucky and Mississippi are the only two states that have off-year elections for state constitutional offices in 2015.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal forms presidential exploratory committee
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal
Jindal, a Republican, to decide on White House bid after legislative session ends in June
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
BATON ROUGE (CFP) — Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has announced the formation of an exploratory committee, a key step toward seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
“If I run, my candidacy will be based on the idea that the American people are ready to try a dramatically different direction. Not a course correction, but a dramatically different path,” Jindal said in a May 18 statement announcing formation of the committee. The committee also launched a website to solicit donations.
Jindal said he will hold off on a formal announcement of a White House run until after the Louisiana legislature adjourns in June.
Jindal, 43, is in his second term as governor of the Pelican State. Prior to being elected in 2007, he won two terms in the U.S. House after a stint in the administration of President George W. Bush. In recent months, he has been making a series of campaign-style appearances in early primary states.
If elected in 2016, Jindal would be the first Indian American to win the presidency. His parents emigrated to the United States shortly before he was born in 1971.
If Jindal enters the race, he will face a crowded field that already includes four fellow Southerners: Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and U.S. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida. Three other Southerners are expected to seek the GOP nomination: Former governors Jeb Bush of Florida and Rick Perry of Texas and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee announces 2016 GOP presidential run
Huckabee, an ordained Baptist pastor and TV host, is making his second try for the White House
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
HOPE, Arkansas (CFP) — Saying he wanted to take America “from hope to higher ground,” former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee kicked off his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination with a speech to an enthusiastic crowd in his hometown May 5.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee
“I ask you to join with me today not just so I can be president, but so we can preserve this great republic,” Huckabee said during a speech at community college in Hope, a town of 11,000 in southwest Arkansas where former President Bill Clinton was also born. “With your help, and God’s, we will make that journey.”
In the opening speech of his second presidential campaign, Huckabee sounded a note of economic populism, saying “power and money and influence have left a lot of Americans lagging behind.”
“They work hard, lift heavy things and sweat through their clothes grinding out a living, but they can’t seem to get ahead or, in some cases, even stay even,” he said. “A record number people are enrolled in government-operated help programs like food stamps not because they want to be in poverty, but because they are part of the bottom earning 90 percent of American workers whose wages have been stagnant for 40 years.”
But Huckabee, an ordained Baptist pastor, also played to his natural base of religious conservatives on the issue of same-sex marriage, blasting federal courts for “criminalizing Christianity in demanding that we abandon biblical principles of natural marriage.”
“Many of our politicians have surrendered to the false god of judicial supremacy, which would allow black-robed and unelected judges the power to make law and enforce it,” he said. “The Supreme Court is not the supreme being, and they can’t overturn the laws of nature or of nature’s God.”
Huckabee said if elected, he would push for term limits on both Congress and the Supreme Court, whose justices now serve for life, and abolish the IRS. He also took a sharp shot at President Barack Obama’s diplomatic approach toward the Islamic world.
“When I hear the current president say he wants Christians to get off their high horse so we can make nice with radical jihadists, I wonder if he could watch a western from the 50s and be able to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are,” he said. “As president, I promise you that we will no longer merely try to contain jihadism. We will conquer it.”
Huckabee, 59, served as Arkansas governor from 1996 to 2007 and ran for president in 2008. With strong support from social conservatives, he won the Iowa caucuses and took seven other primaries, mostly in the South, before conceding to the eventual nominee, U.S. Senator John McCain.
Huckabee’s 2016 run was widely anticipated after he bowed out of his long-running Saturday evening talk show on the Fox News Channel in January. Noting his own financial sacrifice in leaving Fox, he asked his supporters for donations, while taking a swipe at Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and his other GOP rivals who currently hold elected office.
“I don’t have a global foundation or a taxpayer-funded paycheck to live off of. I don’t come from a family dynasty but a working family. I grew up blue collar and not blue blood,” he said, adding that other presidential candidates who currently hold elective office should resign.
“If you live off the government payroll and want to run for an office other than the one you’re elected to, then have the integrity and decency to resign the one you don’t want and pursue the one you decided you’d rather have.”
Though Huckabee moved from Arkansas to Florida when he took the job Fox after his 2008 loss, he regaled his hometown audience with details of his bucolic childhood in Hope.
“I ran trotlines all night at Bois D’Arc Lake with my dad and grandfather to catch catfish that we’d freeze and live off of for weeks,” he said. “It was here I was baptized in the Garrett Memorial Baptist Church after accepting Jesus in a vacation bible school when I was 10 years old. I truly went from Hope to higher ground.”
Huckabee is not the first presidential candidate to use Hope as a prop. In his 1992 campaign, Clinton also played up his roots in Hope, despite the fact that he had moved to the resort town of Hot Springs, in central Arkansas, at age 4.
Huckabee is the fourth Southern Republican to announce a 2016 presidential campaign, joining U.S. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida. Other Southerners expected to seek the GOP nomination include former governors Jeb Bush of Florida and Rick Perry of Texas; U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
On the Democratic side, former U.S. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has already launched an exploratory committee for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination — a race that’s expected to be dominated by former Secretary of State Clinton, a former first lady of Arkansas who went on to be elected to the Senate from New York.
Watch the video of Huckabee’s announcement speech:
Analysis: Hillary Clinton faces steep generational climb on the road to the White House
The younger nominee usually wins, and the age gap between Clinton and a number of her GOP opponents is bigger than what Reagan overcame
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in 2016, at age 69, she will be the second oldest person ever elected to the presidency, just behind Ronald Reagan and just ahead of the ill-fated William Henry Harrison, who perished after just a month in office back in 1841.
And if she wins, Clinton will have overcome a fundamental feature in modern American presidential politics — namely, that the younger presidential nominee is usually victorious.
In the thirteen presidential elections since 1960, the younger candidate has won seven times. However, in two other elections — Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 and George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000 — the candidates were roughly the same age. (Johnson had just a year on Goldwater; Bush had two on Gore.)
So, in only four of the 13 elections did the candidate who was appreciably older pull off a victory. Two of those were won by Reagan, and, in all four, the age gap was substantially less than what Clinton may face in 2016. (The other two were George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Richard Nixon in 1972.)
Now 67, Clinton is more than 20 years older than four of the likely Republican prospects — U.S. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Governors Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal. Indeed, Rubio and Jindal are both 43 — a whopping 24 years younger than Clinton.
To put it another way, Clinton was already studying law at Yale when Rubio and Jindal were still in diapers.
Reagan was the oldest man ever elected to the presidency when he beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, but he was just 13 years older. In contrast, the average age of the 10 leading Republican prospects in 2016 is 52 — 15 years younger than Clinton.
In fact, only two of the likely candidates — former Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush – even share the same decade as Clinton. Perry is 65; Bush, 62.
So, if history is prologue here, Republicans might do themselves some good by nominating someone who can present a generational contrast with Clinton. Bush would seem to be the candidate least able to do this, given his age and pedigree as the son and brother of presidents. But Rubio and Walker are both well positioned to make such a generational case.
Of course, it should be noted that Democrats tried, and failed, to make Reagan’s age a salient issue in both the 1980 and 1984 campaigns. Clearly, history can be defied. But if Democrats decide to nominate the oldest candidate in the field, save for longshot Democrat Bernie Sanders, they will be taking a generational and historical gamble.
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