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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Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush kicks off 2016 presidential campaign
The brother and son of former presidents says no one deserves White House “by right”
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
MIAMI (CFP) — Arguing that the United States is “on a very bad course,” former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, saying Democrats are trying “to hold on to power, to slog on with the same agenda under another name.”
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush
“We will take command of our future once again in this country. We will lift our sights again, make opportunity common again, get events in the world moving our way again,” Bush said at a June 15 rally at Miami-Dade Community College.
“We will take Washington — the static capital of this dynamic country — out of the business of causing problems. We will get back on the side of free enterprise and free people.”
Bush, the son and brother of presidents, also tried to put a bit of distance between himself and his famous family name, saying “not a one of us deserves the job by right of resume, party, seniority, family or family narrative.”
“It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test, and it’s wide open — exactly as a contest for president should be,” he said. “The outcome is entirely up to you, the voters.”
At the rally, the Bush campaign unveiled its logo, which features the word “Jeb” followed by an exclamation point — with no mention of his last name.
Bush also delivered part of his opening speech in Spanish, and his campaign website is in both English and Spanish — nods to Latino voters who in recent elections have trended Democratic.
Bush’s wife, Columba, whom he married in 1974, was born in Mexico, which he jokingly described as part of his “cross-border outreach.”
Bush, 62, served two terms as governor of the Sunshine State from 1999 to 2007. He was mentioned as a candidate for president in 2012 but opted not to run.
In his opening address, he touted his record as governor, noting that during his time in Tallahassee, Florida topped the nation in job creation and taxes were cut every year he was in office.
“A self-serving attitude can take hold in any capital, just as it once did in Tallahassee,” he said. “I was a governor who refused to accept that as the normal or right way of conducting the people’s business. I will not accept it as the standard in Washington. We don’t need another president who merely holds the top spot among the pampered elites of Washington.”
While not mentioning any of his Republican opponents by name, Bush took a strong swipe at Democrats, attacking the “phone-it-in foreign policy” of the “Obama-Clinton-Kerry team” and saying the opposition has “offered a progressive agenda that includes everything but progress.”
“They are responsible for the slowest economic recovery ever, the biggest debt increases ever, a massive tax increase on the middle class, the relentless buildup of the regulatory state and the swift, mindless downturn of a military that was generations in the making,” he said.
And in a remark that drew strong applause from Cuban-American Republicans in the audience, he criticized Obama for considering making a state visit to Communist Cuba.
“We don’t need a glorified tourist to go to Havana in support of a failed Cuba,” he said. “We need an American president to go to Havana in solidarity with a free Cuban people, and I am ready to be that president.”
Bush also steered clear of two issues that have caused him heartburn with the GOP’s Tea Party base — immigration reform and the Common Core educational standards, both of which he supports.
Bush 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 governors Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry of Texas and U.S. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana expected to announce his candidacy soon, now that his state’s legislature has adjourned for the year.
The Southern GOP field is divided equally between senators and governors. Two of the last three Republicans elected president — George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan — served as governor, while 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 Bush’s campaign kickoff:
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry launches second bid for the White House
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:
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:
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:
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