Why Are Republican Presidential Candidates Getting Sillier Each Election Cycle?
November 12, 2015Matt Terzi Politics
Republish
Reprint
George W. Bush: A Republican Presidential Candidate You Can Have A Beer With.
It was October of 1999, and I was sitting in a dining hall at Binghamton University with a few friends, when I heard someone say something about one of the republican presidential candidates that I considered to be rather profound, enough so that I committed the event to memory: one friend revealed he was going to vote for George W. Bush, because he was, and I’m quoting here, “the only authentic candidate.”
Bush was authentic all right. This was the month in which we had learned that “Dubya” had been arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession. That his campaign was being heavily funded by big tobacco. That he was a draft dodger. Those were all points the rest of us were quick to bring up, while also reminding our friend that Bush could barely make it through a complete sentence without making an ass of himself. He was, as republican presidential candidates go, a joke.
George W. Bush was “authentic,” all right. He’d dodged the draft, been arrested for cocaine possession, and was heavily funded by big tobacco.
Any one of these factors should’ve turned people away from George W. Bush, and if he had run in 1996 or in 1992 (against his own father), he’d have lost heavy-handedly. But something changed culturally, or perhaps ideologically, in the 1990’s. I’m not sure what that change was, either. Republicans were shifting away from serious, credentialed candidates who ran on the merits of their qualifications and the convictions of their ideas. They liked Bush not because of his plans for America’s future or his experience in governance… they wanted to “have a beer with him.” They weren’t electing a president, but a drinking buddy. And that, more than anything else, was something George W. Bush had an excellent resume for.
Fast-forward to the 2004 presidential race, and Bush narrowly won his reelection bid. Why? Because John Kerry was, quite frankly, boring. It didn’t matter that Bush was an abysmal president, or that Kerry was vastly more experienced and intelligent than Bush… Kerry was about as exciting as watching a golf game broadcast over C-SPAN while your high school math teacher gave a sermon in Sunday morning church.
John McCain Seemed Like A Serious Republican Presidential Candidate Until…
When the 2008 presidential cycle started closing in, I thought the worst was finally behind us. Surely the GOP would pick a candidate of merit, of sound mind, the perfect antithesis of everything George W. Bush could never be. And that’s precisely who they picked, too: John McCain, a figure as serious as a heart attack and with enough legislative experience to quite frankly embarrass the rest of the Republican presidential candidates. In that moment, I thought to myself “Finally! Maybe now our politics can get serious again!”
That’s when America met Sarah Palin.
Palin was everything a vice presidential candidate shouldn’t be: loud, brash, thuggish with her unreasonable hatred of Barack Obama, and ignorant enough to make George W. Bush look like a Rhodes Scholar. But while most of America pointed at Palin and laughed, and elevated SNL’s Tina Fey to folk hero status in the process, Republicans were swinging wildly to the right, casting out their “RINO” moderates, and brewing a new degree of insanity that would inevitably give birth to the Tea Party movement… legions of comically-dressed conservative buffoons ranting about taxes and demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. Suddenly, McCain’s presidential ambitions were far sillier than those of Bush eight years prior. And when McCain found himself defending Barack Obama when a woman in a town hall meeting called him a Muslim, that was probably the precise moment when McCain realized he was witnessing a passing of the guard; that the GOP was no longer a serious party for serious people, but was a clown show in which he was merely a spectator.
When did McCain realize he was witnessing a passing of the guard; that the GOP was no longer a serious party for serious people, but was a clown show in which he was merely a spectator?
When the 2012 election cycle rolled around, I had finally learned my lesson, and knew that the GOP would fill up their field with goofballs and wacky caricatures of contemporary conservatism, and they certainly didn’t let me down. As a professional satirist at the time, I was blessed with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and the end-all, be-all of hilarious presidential candidates: Herman Cain, whose “9-9-9” plan was borrowed from a video game and who recited the lyrics to the Pokémon theme song during a speech, in about as serious a tone as one could muster. The field was so ridiculous in 2012 that Mitt Romney, a man who joked about firing people, called 47% of Americans lazy, and had once strapped a dog kennel to the roof of his car before driving cross-country, was the most serious and viable candidate in the running.
And now we find ourselves in the 2016 cycle, and Republicans have managed, yet again, to outdo themselves with how silly their field is. The Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 race are so ridiculous that I left the satire world earlier this year, because I quite frankly can’t make anything up more comical than the real thing. John Kasich and Rand Paul are the only two serious Republicans in the field, and neither has any hope in **** of winning the primary. Meanwhile, the field is dominated by Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina… four total nitwits I wouldn’t trust to run a book club, let alone the entirety of the free world.
It really makes me wonder what we’re going to see in the 2020 cycle. The Republican presidential candidates running that year surely can’t be worse than Donald Trump or Ben Carson, right? But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past fifteen years, it’s that no matter how ridiculous you think the GOP field has become, they’ll always find a way to trump it the next time around. So brace yourselves for the 2020 race, folks, because Charlie Sheen, Victoria Jackson, Rush Limbaugh, Chuck Norris, and a hologram of Ronald Reagan are going to seriously change the game.
Until the gop gets a viable candidate they are doomed |
