It looks as if Hillary Rodham Clinton will end up winning the Democrat presidential nomination in 2016 and may well end up as the United States' first female President. Given quirks of US federal politics compared to the rest of the western world, she may already have an insurmountable advantage over the Republican Opposition. And what are the alternatives? Why is this? Here's their problem. Back in 2008, they had to fight a highly unpopular and seriously incompetent Bush presidency's incumbency record, while Obama emerged as the clear victor on the Democrat side. In 2012, matters were significantly worse. Mitt Romney might have seemed like the natural choice for Republican presidential candidate, and so he eventually emerged- after several months of fratricidal competition with other contenders such as fundamentalist former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, former Pennsylvania federal US Senator Rick Santorum, Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry, former US federal Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich and pseudo-libertarian Texas Republican Ron Paul. The United States party system seems to have far weaker party discipline and no established position of Leader of the Opposition, although Newt Gingrich did his best to try to turn the position of House of Representatives Speaker into that role during his mid-nineties term of office. While the Republicans made spectacular gains during the 2010 midterm US Congressional elections, they were beaten back in 2012 and 2014. Let's analyse the contenders for 2016 as they are currently arranged. Hillary Rodham Clinton is former US First Lady to Bill Clinton, who served as US President during the nineties (1992-2000), federal US Senator for New York (2000-2009) and the first ex-presidential spouse to have run for public office in her or his own right. She was educated at Wellesley College and Yale Law School. Before marrying Bill, she served as Congressional legal counsel and founded a child advocacy group, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (1977), while also becoming the first president of the Legal Services Corporation. During the late nineties, she played an active role in advocating for children's rights. In 2008, she won the most primaries and delegates of any prior female contender for the US presidency, but narrowly lost the Democrat nomination to Barack Obama. In recognition of her formidable public policy experience, she was made his first Secretary of State (2009-2013) and served with distinction in the role. She then proved her worth by finally tracking down Osama bin Laden, the murderous Saudi Islamist architect of the attack on New York's Twin Towers that cost three thousand innocent lives. In 2013, she left that role, to concentrate on her ambition for a renewed presidential tilt. Her position on LGBT issues has evolved over time and she now supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and civil marriage equality. John Ellis (Jeb) Bush is the younger brother of former US President George W.Bush and offspring of an earlier US President, George H. Bush. He has served as former Republican Governor for Florida for two terms (1999-2007). He is bilingual and a fluent Spanish speaker, which may win him support within Central and South American immigrant families. He has career relationships with the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing US lobby and public policy advocacy group opposed to LGBT rights and marriage equality. He worked for the establishment of charter schools, a statewide scholarship fund for low-income students and established three new medical schools while Florida Governor. He signed environmental protection laws to protect the Everglades, cut state government spending, cut public service employment rolls, and opposed gun control laws, introduction of LGBT-inclusive antidiscrimination and EEO legislation, and restrictions on the exercise of capital punishment while in office. It is worth noting that while the controversy over Florida's national voter share was raging in 2000, Bush recused himself from any participation in the process, lest it be thought that he was biased in favour of his brother, George W. Bush. Slightly in his favour, the Tea Party doesn't like him because he's too pragmatic to be a hardline anti-immigrant racist. Ted Cruz is the current Cuban-American Republican Senator from Texas, the first to serve in that capacity. As an adolescent, he was involved with a fiscal conservative group in that state, the Free Market Education Foundation, and as a university student, was one of the editors of the Harvard Law Review and Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, as well as founding the Harvard Latino Law Review. He had close relationships to the Bush presidential campaign in the late nineties and served as a legal advisor to that campaign. As Texas Solicitor-General, he opposed gun control laws and restricted the applicability of international law to US domestic situations. In 2011, he was elected a US Senator and has introduced legislation to attack environmental safeguards and children's healthcare access under ObamaCare public health insurance provisions. Like Jeb Bush, he opposes gun control, as well as ObamaCare. He is a climate change denialist and anti-abortion. Like Bush, he has close relationships to the Heritage Foundation. Scott Walker is the current Republican Governor of Wisconsin. He supports welfare privatisation and retrenchment 'reform,' favours greater sentencing severity on matters of criminal justice policy, and is opposed to abortion as a conservative evangelical/fundamentalist Christian. When it comes to religious freedom issues, Walker sought to prevent the hiring of a Wisconsin state employee, Jamyi Witch, because she was a neopagan (2001-2). Fortunately, religious freedom prevailed on that front and Witch was hired regardless of sectarian objections. Social service cuts led to bitter anti-Walker protests from government service employees and local trade unions in 2011-12. When the state courts decided for marriage equality, he accepted that "ended the matter" as far as he was concerned. However, he also favours 'religious liberty' exemptions from antidiscrimination service provision coverage for conservative Christians employed in secular occupations. Marco Rubio has a background in Florida Republican politics, much like Jeb Bush, having served as a member and Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives before his election as a Florida Republican US Senator in 2011. Like Ted Cruz, he comes from a Cuban-American background. He favours federal budget cuts and as a devout Roman Catholic opposes employers being compelled to include contraception within their employee health care packages, backed Tea Party brinkspersonship over the federal budget in 2011 and opposes gun control, although he is a moderate reformist when it comes to regulating illegal immigration compared to other right-wing Republicans. He opposes budget stimulus expenditure, is anti-abortion, opposes marriage equality, opposes gun control and access to medicinal cannabis derivatives and is a climate change denialist like Cruz. Rick Perry was the 47th (Republican) Governor of Texas. Unlike any of the alternative aspirants, he has a military service record, as a United States Air Force Captain in the 1970s. He had an inconsistent record as a fiscal conservative when it came to his time as Texas Governor. He is a hardline prohibitionist anti-abortionist, and opposes Obamacare's federal public healthcare initiative. He is also a hardliner on LGBT issues. He opposed the repeal of Texas' antisodomy law before the US Supreme Court's Lawrence versus Texas (2003) decision fortunately made that issue academic through decriminalisation of homosexuality. In 2008, he equated homosexuality with 'alcoholism.' He opposes marriage equality, reform of the Boy Scouts admission policy, and supports capital punishment- even in the case of intellectually and cognitively disabled inmates. He has been under investigation for blocking expenditure on a Texas state-government anti-corruption project. Like Perry, Mike Huckabee is a former Republican Governor (Arkansas, 1996-2007). He is a fundamentalist Southern Baptist and has even served as President of the Arkansas State Southern Baptist Convention (1998-9). In 2008, he was a Republican presidential nomination aspirant. Like Perry, Huckabee is a hardline prohibitionist anti-abortionist. He opposes marriage equality, free trade agreements (!!!), supports intelligent design creationism, supports stricter border controls against illegal immigrants and opposes strengthened gun control legislation. He supports a herbal diabetes quack cure. Huckabee may be the remotest prospect as a Republican aspirant given the weakness of his fiscal conservative credentials and his outspoken social conservatism. Either Bush, Rubio, Cruz or Perry may appeal to the growing US Hispanic community, but Huckabee won't. Bush has the dubious 'advantage' of being the sibling of one president and son of another, which may give rise to either guilt by association, given George W.Bush's sheer presidential mediocrity, or accusations of nepotism and dynasticism and questions about whether the United States is becoming an oligarchy instead of a liberal democracy (although given Hillary Clinton is a former First Lady, the same might be true in her context. On the other hand, she's carved out her own career as a public representative since her husband left office and being the Secretary of State responsible for Osama bin Laden's capture and death may earn her foreign policy respect points.) Perry and Huckabee may be too hardline when it comes to abortion rights to be palatable to moderate Republican pro-choice voters outside the Southern United States. Unless Mitt Romney decides to run for the Republican nomination again, Bush and Cruz may end up on a split ticket. Whether this will be enough to halt the considerable momentum Hillary Clinton has already built up is a moot point. If Clinton does become the first female US president, it will be a salutary lesson to the Republicans not to nominate social conservative extremists for public office, a lesson that the British Conservatives and New Zealand National Party have already successfully learnt. And if she does, and if she serves two terms, that will mean that the Republican Party will have been denied the presidency for sixteen years. Politics and religion commentator Craig Young - 14th May 2015
Credit: Politics and religion commentator Craig Young
First published: Thursday, 14th May 2015 - 3:10pm