Race for the White House 2016 Volume 24

By this time next week, two professional sports leagues will have crowned champions but the long Presidential race continues to march on and the ranks of candidates such as Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Scott Walker, and Bernie Sanders will have to wait a lot longer than athletes such as Jonathan Toews, Steven Stamkos, Stephen Curry, and LeBron James, just for the right to advance to the Finals.

On Monday, Republican Jeb Bush, who still looks like the best potential President out of the bunch to me, will formally kick off his campaign in Miami. This comes after several weeks of unfavorable political headlines. This past week saw his organization name they key campaign officials and 39 year old Danny Diaz will be managing the campaign after a bit of a perceived internal shakeup. Of course, it makes perfect sense to make this kind of "change" before things get formally underway and Diaz is expected to bring a lot of intensity to the Bush effort.

The other side saw the Democrat frontrunner, whose campaign is managed by 35 year old Robby Mook (childhood first name variations must be in for these top level ops) do a bit of a re-launch today after several weeks of bad headlines. Hillary Clinton had her first big rally today in New York City before heading out to the early states. Many had been under the impression that her campaign had a formal kick-off some time ago, but that launch did not have the intended results. This past week saw polls in which slippage continued for Clinton, especially in a poll from the battleground state of Ohio, where a typically very friendly to Democrats pollster found her favorability with Buckeye State voters at just 38 percent. Of course, she is more popular than that with ardent Democrats, who likely cheered what she had to say today in 45 minute speech, that was heavy on platitudes but certainly quite left leaning. The days of the '92 Clinton "Third Way" effort are long gone in the Democrat Party indeed.

Much of the political news this past week took place on Capitol Hill as Barack Obama attempted and failed to get nearly enough Democrats to join most of the Republicans in voting for free trade legislation he wanted. While many Republicans in Congress voted no citing distrust of Obama, this is one of the few times I have agreed with Obama on something. You know what they say about broken clocks. However, his lobbying failed and even Democrats complained about the approach he took in which he seemed to impugn their political integrity. That is something that feels all too familiar to Republicans in their dealings with Obama.

The most interesting aspect of the trade debate has probably been the silence of Hillary Clinton, who has not weighed in on a "hard choice." As Secretary of State, she supported the particular trade deal, but has not come out for it or against it while Congressional debate raged on. The AFL-CIO, and other Democrat candidates have called on her to come out against it and against Obama.

While Bernie Sanders is said to be drawing large crowds in Iowa, as past very liberal candidates have in the state before, Clinton remains the strong favorite for the Caucuses there and in all other states. However, as her campaign reaches a more visible and presumably transparent period, much remains to be seen how she will do with the media and with citizens who are not pre-selected and may have tough questions. All that is before any debates even begin.

The GOP field is of course far larger and almost impossible to keep up with on a daily basis. One major development though is the cancellation of the Iowa Straw Poll, which was to have taken place in August and has typically served as a winnowing process for the field.

There are still months to go though of minor campaign stories such as Marco Rubio's past finances (funny how the last nominee was attacked for being too successful and a potential new nominee is being attacked for once having the same sort of money troubles that many Americans have), Lindsey Graham's potential of "rotating First Ladies" (which caused my GOP U.S. Senator from Illinois some grief after some pretty over the top fake outrage after a joke he made was captured on an open mic), whatever in the world Donald Trump plans to announce this week, and whatever happened to former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore and his expected 2016 run.

Scratch that. I do not think anybody out there is really wondering about Gilmore right now.