Columnist Jack Davies quickly goes over Republican and Democratic presidential candidates for the upcoming election.
I stated in my last article that the current presidential election is a confused mess. I believe that this rather strong statement is also an understatement. Indeed, it seems that the election can be compared without hyperbole to last year’s irritating instrument of ear torture ‘Too Many Cooks.' In an attempt to abate this confusion, this column will be a breakdown of all of the major candidates for this year’s election. A too many crooks, if you will.
In the red corner we have the Republican candidates. The first thing that is remarkable about them is their sheer number. There are a ridiculous number of them. The reason for this number is simple; the GOP is divided into far more political factions than the Democratic Party, which for various reasons is more ideologically cohesive. In the interests of space I’ll simply cover the major ones. The difference between a major and minor candidate is somewhat arbitrary but we’ll choose Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio because of their results in the recent realclearpolitics.com poll.
Let’s start with Bush; obviously, he’d be the third of the dynasty to achieve presidential rank. Bush has postured himself as a moderate voice during his campaigning, saying that he still has conservative principles but emphasizing his Spanish fluency and his wife’s Mexican origins. He supports tax cuts across the board for all Americans, a path to legal residency for illegal immigrants and a strong national defense including the PATRIOT Act and NSA metadata collection.
Ted Cruz is posturing as the Tea Party’s candidate in this election, with all that entails — he has a textualist understanding of the Constitution and opposes most recent legal developments concerning social issues. Like Bush, Cruz is actively trying to court the Hispanic vote.
Ben Carson is an outsider candidate; he is playing up his medical background and lack of connection to the Washington establishment. Despite being the ultra-conservative candidate of the party, he is seeking to capture some of the African American vote — some have compared him to Cory Booker.
Finally we have Marco Rubio. Rubio relied on the Tea Party heavily for his election to the US Senate, but has since voted against them on national defense and immigration. Rubio supports comprehensive immigration reform and a limit on federal spending capped to the inflation rate, but the rest of his policy is standard Republican fare.
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In the blue corner we have the Democrats. With Joe Biden still deciding whether to run, there are only two real contestants — Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. I still don’t understand Hillary’s campaign. She’s a technocrat without concrete policies. She's an elitist trying to be a populist, using anti-corporate rhetoric but taking money from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. She is also the closest thing America has to an aristocrat, but doesn’t stress her own record of public service, and seems to have forgotten to clean the skeletons out of her closet. Nevertheless, she has laid out three broad points for her campaign: redistributing wealth to communities, getting unaccountable money out of the political system and national defense.
I covered Bernie last week, so I’ll recount only briefly. Bernie Sanders has been fairly unique in specifically laying out his plans for the country, but broadly speaking, they all involve economic redistribution. Bernie's plans involve a greater degree of this than Hillary's do.
Jack Davies is a sophomore studying philosophy. What candidate do you think will end up ahead of the rest? Email him at jd814213@ohio.edu.
