Jeb Bush Says He Won't Pander To The Right-WIng Yahoos Who Dominate The Republican Primary System... So There!

After all the dust settles and the fuss dies down, this is what Hillary will be facing

Yesterday started with a bang for people handicapping the Republican 2016 presidential nomination. Ohio junior Senator Rob Portman, George W. Bush's spectacularly failed Director of Management and Budget and (earlier) Trade Rep, said he won't be running for president (nor, presumably, the job most people thought more likely, vice president). Recent polls showed him hovering around zero percent, even less than also-rans like Rick Perry (2%), John Kasich (2%), Bobby Jindal (2%), Marco Rubio (2%) and Rick Santorum (1%). But clueless Beltway opinion-makers love him because he doesn't stand for anything beyond maintaining the status quo, the cause of their lives.

And that wasn't all. We've been pointing out that Rand Paul can't run for president if he also runs for his Senate seat, which he would have to do if he doesn't want to go back to being a third rate ophthalmologist in 2017. Shane Goldmacher reported for the National Journal that Paul, a libertarian who doesn't believe in laws, has no intention of letting any dinky Kentucky laws stop him from running. "Rand Paul's brain trust," he wrote, "has spent months developing an exhaustive political and legal battle plan to ensure he can run for both Senate reelection and the White House in 2016-- despite a Kentucky law that suggests otherwise. They have developed backup plans for their backup plans in an all-out effort to safeguard Paul's Senate seat should he falter in the presidential sweepstakes. The contingencies range from changing Kentucky into a presidential caucus state to filing a lawsuit challenging the law, from daring Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes to keep him off the ballot to taking her out next November if she does... The problem facing Paul is pretty simple. Kentucky law says 'no candidate's name shall appear on any voting machine or absentee ballot more than once.' Yet Paul wants to appear as a candidate both for Senate and president."

But the biggest news was neither about Portman's nor Paul's decisions. It was a 6AM snapshot by Jonathan Martin in the NY Times about the agonies of Jeb Bush, the darling of the Republican Party old-line Establishment.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida was blunt Monday night: If he runs for president in 2016, he will not pander to his party’s conservative base in the primaries.

“Lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles,” Mr. Bush said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in Washington. “It’s not an easy task to be honest with you.”

Mr. Bush said he would make a decision about the 2016 race “in short order” and sketched out the sort of campaign that he said Republicans must run to take back the White House. “It has to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more willing to be practical,” he said.

Practicality is not, of course, the primary attribute many Republican primary voters look for in a presidential hopeful. Still, Mr. Bush noted, the viability of an unapologetically pragmatic bid has not been tested.

“Frankly, no one really knows that because it hasn’t been tried recently,” he said, prompting a round of knowing chuckles among the business executives in attendance.

Mr. Bush recognized what he had implied and quickly heaped praise on the last Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

The Republican activist base doesn't want another Mitt Romney/John McCain nominee. They want Ted Cruz or some other crackpot. Cruz is the Hate Talk Radio candidate and they're not going to be sold a bill of goods again.