Jeb Bush's Ace In The Hole?

by JASmius



A little convention rules time-bomb left behind by our old friend Mitt Romney, set to go off when the GOP "establishment" needs it the most:

A procedural rule change adopted at the 2012 Republican National Convention amending how many delegates are needed to win the party nomination could "upend" the GOP’s nomination process, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Before 2012, in order to be qualify for the nomination, a candidate had to have the written support of a "plurality" of the delegates from at least five States, according to RedState.com.

At the convention in Tampa that year, the rule was changed to require a presidential candidate to have the support of a "majority" of the delegates from at least eight States.

According to RedState, the catalyst for the 2012 rule change was Mitt Romney, who the website states "broke all precedent and used his power as the incoming nominee to change the rules, to centralize power in the hands of the establishment, and to make it very much harder for any power in the party to flow from the bottom up."

With such a crowded 2016 field, winning a majority of delegates in any State may be problematic. [emphasis added]

I've been arguing for years now that the GOP grassroots/Tea Party endlessly blows its own feet off by fragmenting itself among multiple also-ran/long-shot/outright-kook candidates that have zero chance of winning, paving the way for the "establishment" favorite to cruise to the nomination and on to crushing defeat the following November instead of unifying early behind a single viable conservative alternative that can win a head-to-head matchup.  That would be thirty-five years to be precise, as the last time the latter actually happened was Ronald Reagan's nomination victory in 1980.

Now here we find, like a long-buried piece of logic-bomb malware, a rule that exploits and exacerbates that very ruinous tendency that the ridiculously overpopulated 2016 Republican field all but makes a fait accompli .  Rather than even limiting the field to governors and consigning Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, et al to the outer darkness, now we've got a situation where nobody outside of Jeb Bush can possibly clear that elevated threshold, because they'll all be money-bombed out of the race before any of them can ever get a chance to do so.

Which goes to show that it isn't just the commumedia complex that is trying to shove Bush III down our throats.

But, as an interesting postscript, while we're told that Jeb is raising tons of money for his campaign warchest, guess who out-raised him in Q2 of 2015?:

With the July 15th reporting deadline coming up next week, here is what the CAMPAIGNS have raised so far in the second quarter.

Hillary Clinton campaign: $45 million
Bernie Sanders campaign: $15 million
Jeb Bush: $11.4 million [emphasis added]

Either all the remaining "wealthy/rich/1%" in this country are leftwingnut Democrats, or there is that little enthusiasm on the part of the GOP grassroots for the field of candidates with which they are being presented.

Boy, Scott Walker can't declare soon enough, can he?