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But a Quinnipiac University poll finds a majority of Sunshine State voters think Clinton isn’t trustworthy
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
GAINESVILLE, Fla. (CFP) — Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state’s U.S. senator, Marco Rubio, are in a dead heat in the GOP presidential sweepstakes in their home state, and both men are far ahead of the rest of the field, a new poll finds.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush
The Quinniapiac University poll of Florida voters also found that while both Bush and Rubio narrowly trailed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in hypothetical general election match-ups, a majority of Florida voters say they think Clinton isn’t trustworthy.
In the Republican primary race, Bush was the choice of 20 percent of registered Republicans in the poll, with Rubio at 18 percent, which was within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4.6 percent. No other candidate was in double digits.
When voters were asked to name both their first and second choices in the crowded GOP field, Rubio was either the first or second choice of 36 percent of respondents; Bush, 33 percent.
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio
Florida is likely to loom large in the 2016 Republican presidential contest. The state legislature moved the primary to March 15, which will make Florida first among the four largest states to hold a primary, and the Florida Republican Party decided to make it a winner-take-all affair, putting a treasure trove of 99 delegates up for grabs.
In Quinniapiac’s hypothetical general election match-ups, Clinton led Rubio 47 percent to 44 percent, just outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percent. Her lead over Bush was 46 percent to 42 percent.
When asked whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Clinton, respondents were nearly evenly split, with 47 percent saying they viewed her favorably and 45 percent unfavorably.
However, when they were asked if they found Clinton trustworthy, only 43 percent said yes, while 51 percent said no.
Bush was viewed favorably by 52 percent and unfavorably by 36 percent. Rubio was viewed favorably by 50 percent and unfavorably by 34 percent.
Florida has become a key bellweather state in presidential politics. The last person to win the White House without carrying the state was Bill Clinton in 1992, and in the last 16 presidential elections, the winner carried Florida 14 times.
Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, touts his executive experience in campaign kickoff
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
ADDISON, Texas (CFP) — Charging that Americans “are at the end of an era of failed leadership,” former Texas Governor Rick Perry launched his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination by touting his experience as the longest-serving governor in the history of the Lone Star State.
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry
“Leadership is not a speech on the Senate floor. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. And we will not find the kind of leadership needed to revitalize the country by looking to the political class in Washington,” Perry said at his campaign kickoff at an airport in Addison, a Dallas suburb.
“I have been tested. I have led the most successful state in America. I have dealt with crisis after crisis, from the disintegration of a space shuttle to hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike, to the crisis at the border and the first diagnosis of Ebola in America.”
Perry, 65, a former Air Force officer who was a cotton farmer in West Texas before getting into politics, left office in January after serving 14 years as governor. He began his political life in 1984 as a Democrat before switching the GOP in 1989, as it became ascendent in Texas politics.
In 2012, Perry unsuccessfully sought the GOP presidential nomination. He entered the campaign as one of the frontrunners, only to see his stock plummet after a series of of gaffes, including a moment in a debate when he could not remember the name of a federal agency he had previously pledged to abolish.
Perry — who later blamed his faltering 2012 performance on lack of preparation and the aftereffects of back surgery — did not mention his first campaign during his kickoff rally. But he did offer scathing criticism of President Barack Obama’s leadership.
“We have been led by a divider who has sliced and diced the electorate, pitting American against American for political purposes,” he said. “Weakness at home has led to weakness abroad. The world has descended into a chaos of this president’s own making, while his White House loyalists construct an alternative universe where ISIS is contained and Ramadi is merely a setback.”
Perry also decried what he called “the arrogance of Washington DC, representing itself as some beacon of wisdom, with policies smothering this vast land with no regard for what makes each state and community unique.”
He also sounded a note of economic populism, saying “it is time to create real jobs, to raise wages, to create opportunity for all, to give every citizen a stake in this country, to restore hope — real hope — to forgotten Americans, millions of middle class families who have given up hope of getting ahead.”
As he pursues the presidency, Perry is also battling felony charges of abuse of power and coercion brought by a prosecutor in Austin stemming from his veto, as governor, of $7.5 million in funding for a public integrity unit in the office of Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg.
In April 2013, Lehmberg, a Democrat, was arrested for driving with a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit, and video showed her being combative with the arresting officers. Perry demanded the Lehmberg resign and, when she didn’t, followed through with a threat to veto funding for the unit.
Perry has vowed to fight the charges, which he has dismissed as politically motivated.
Perry is one of eight Southern Republicans who have launched, or are expected to launch, presidential bids in 2016.
Those already in the race include former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and U.S. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Also expected to enter the race are Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida.
The Southern GOP field, then, is divided equally between senators and governors. Two of the last three Republicans elected president — George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan — served as governor. The last GOP senator elected to the presidency was Warren Harding in 1920.
On the Democratic side, former U.S. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has already launched an exploratory committee for the 2016 Democratic 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 Perry’s campaign kickoff:
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:
Rubio, trying to become America’s first Latino president, kicks off 2016 campaign in Miami
MIAMI (CFP) — Charging that “our very identity as an exceptional nation is at stake,” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has kicked off his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio
During an announcement rally in Miami April 13, the senator — at 43 one of the youngest potential candidates in the White House chase — framed the race as “a generational choice about what kind of country we will be.”
“While our people and economy are pushing the boundaries of the 21st century, too many of our leaders and their ideas are stuck in the 20th century,” he said.
“They are busy looking backward, so they do not see how jobs and prosperity today depend on our ability to compete in a global economy. So our leaders put us at a disadvantage by taxing, borrowing and regulating like it’s 1999.”
Rubio also took a direct swipe at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — 24 years his senior — who announced Sunday that she would seek the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday. But yesterday is over, and we are never going back.”
Rubio, the son of refugees from Cuba’s communist dictatorship, began his campaign symbolically at Miami’s iconic Freedom Tower, where Cuban immigrants to the United States were processed after arriving in the 1960s.
“Their story is part of the larger story of the American miracle — how, united by a common faith in their God given right to go as far as their talent and work would take them, a collection of immigrants and exiles, former slaves and refugees, became one people,” he said.
“For almost all of human history, power and wealth belonged only to a select few … But America is different. Here, we are the children and grandchildren of people who refused to accept this.”
If he wins the presidency, Rubio would be the first Latino, and the first Cuban-American, to be elected president. Another Cuban-American, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is also seeking the GOP nomination.
But in deciding to seek the presidency, Rubio will give up what was considered a relatively safe Senate seat, triggering a wide-open race in the Sunshine State in 2016 that will present a possible pickup opportunity for Democrats.
Rubio opted not to try to simultaneously seek the presidency and re-election to the Senate, as one of his GOP presidential rivals, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, is doing in Kentucky.
The Florida senator will also likely be battling a fellow Floridian and political mentor, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is also expected to make a 2016 White House bid.
Rubio the former speaker of the Florida House, rode a wave of conservative and Tea Party support in 2010 to win a Senate seat, besting Florida’s sitting governor at the time, Charlie Crist. He quickly rose to national prominence and was mentioned as a vice presidential pick in 2012.
Rubio has also garnered headlines for his work on immigration reform, which has drawn the ire of the GOP’s small, but noisy, nativist wing. Opponents of immigration reform have also criticized Bush for much the same reason.
Rubio, Cruz, Paul and Bush are among nine Southerners — eight Republicans and one Democrat — considering a White House bid in 2016.
Among the other potential Southern GOP candidates are former governors Mike Huckabee of Arkansas 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 Rubio’s announcement speech:
Kentucky senator and Tea Party favorite kicks off with anti-establishment pitch
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
LOUISVILLE (CFP) — Vowing “to rescue a great country now adrift,” U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky kicked off his campaign for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination with a call for Republicans not to settle for a nominee who is a “Democrat light.”
U.S. Senator Rand Paul
“We cannot, we must not, dilute our message or give up on our principles,” Paul said at an April 7 kickoff rally at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville. “We need to go boldly forth under the banner of liberty that clutches the Constitution in one hand and the Bill of Rights in the other.”
The crowd at the rally hoisted signs with twin slogans capturing the outside, anti-establishment tenor of Paul’s campaign — “Defeat the Washington Machine” and “Unleash the American Dream.”
Paul, 52, an opthtamologist, was elected to the Senate in the Republican sweep of 2010 with support from Tea Party groups and the GOP’s libertarian wing. Playing to those libertarian voters, Paul said he would end government surveillance programs of phone and computer records that began during the Bush administration and were continued under President Obama.
“Warrantless searches of Americans’ phones and computer records are un-American and a threat to our civil liberties,” he said. “I say that your phone records are yours. I say the phone records of law-abiding citizens are none of their damn business.”
Paul also brought up his skepticism of U.S. intervention overseas — a position that has put him at sharp odds with the defense and foreign policy establishment within the Republican Party.
“I see an America strong enough to deter foreign aggression, yet wise enough to avoid unnecessary intervention,” he said. However, Paul also said American interests are under assault from “radical Islam.”
“Not only will I name the enemy, I will do whatever it takes to defend American from these haters of mankind.”
Paul also made a populist pitch for support on the issue of income inequality, saying “under the watch of both parties, the poor seem to get poorer and the right get richer.”
In addition to seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Paul is also simultaneously seeking re-election to his Senate seat in Kentucky.
Paul is now the second announced GOP presidential candidate, joining U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who announced his candidacy March 24. A third candidate, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, is expected to announce next week.
The trio are among nine Southerners — eight Republicans and one Democrat — considering a White House bid in 2016.
Among the other potential Southern GOP candidates are former governors Jeb Bush of Florida, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas 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 Hillary Clinton, a former first lady of Arkansas.
View Paul’s announcement speech:
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