The Donald.  He's all the rage.  Let me tell you something about Donny:  The GOP leadership – establishment, TEA party, "True Conservatives", "RINO's and all the rest deserve him.  His popularity is the manifestation of the dissatisfaction that the rank and file GOP have with the leadership in the Congress over the past ten years.  I don't limit "leadership" to any single person either.  You ain't going to hang this on Boehner's well-tanned hide.  Every elected person in that building is a piece of our leadership.  We've accomplished pretty much zero at the national level…..and maybe less – we've handed Mr. Obama essentially his entire agenda without an argument.  It makes people mad and when that happens, they start to look around for an option. 

Look at health care.  It's exactly what the democrats wanted and almost nothing they didn't.  Look, health care isn't an abstract notion to me.  As an employer for the past 15 years I've paid untold hundreds of thousands of dollars into the healthcare system and I know it needed to be overhauled.  I was getting nailed with double-digit increases every year.  However, instead of working with the Democrats to try to achieve something that's not explicitly designed to devolve into single-payer we could have started with some more common-sense reforms.  How about enabling competition across state borders?  Instead we scheduled umpteen votes to repeal the ACA.  Which achieved exactly…..zero.

Should we talk about immigration?  That situation has gotten worse over the past 10 years.  Jackson Miller ran on immigration like 10 years ago!  Marc and I ran on it 2 years after that and the tools available to localities during this time have only dwindled.  The 287g program was axed and replaced with some other watered down affair.  The leadership in Washington has done nothing.  Those that have taken a hard stance against "amnesty" are just as guilty as those who want a path to citizenship of getting nothing done.  It sounds good on TV when Ted Cruz carries on and I'm sure his base loves it but all of that bluster has zero impact on main street.  Again, the leadership achieved exactly……zero.

Budget? Deficit reduction happened via sequestration but now republicans are supporting getting rid of it?….zero.  All the stuff that republicans stand for…..

Look, Donny ain't going to be our nominee.  I think that the sum total of his impact will be to smother some of the field (Cruz, Walker, etc.) and, oddly enough, enable Bush to secure the nomination.  But the GOP has a serious problem here.  The dogs don't like the dog food.  That's going to continue until the dialog changes or until Donny says something really dumb and offensive.  My money is on Donny imploding.  Jeb Bush is really the only one who has the resources to change the dialog but he's running as the "adult in the room" so I don't look for that to happen.  Donny will implode and Jeb will be standing behind him with a bag of money large enough to simply crush his opponents.  All he has to do is look "presidential" and not botch the debates (all bets are off if that happens).  Jeb's got a better than 50% chance against Hillary but that's not an election people will be excited about.  I don't think that Jeb is a candidate who will unify the party.  

All of that is what I think.  What do I want? America deserves better.  I think every election should be a competition of ideas.  When elections aren't about ideas – even at the City level – they're about people.  Progress results and problems get solved when elections are about ideas.  Nasty elections that turn voters off long-term result when elections are about people.  The best leaders can blend both.  The best guy to do this lately is Bob McDonnell.  Governor Bob essentially wrote the playbook on how to win in VA and Mrs. Comstock appears to be the only VA republican to have read it.  Both of those guys are staunch social conservatives and didn't hide from it…but what they ran on where some ideas on how to solve the problems that ailed us.  

My hope is that, as the debate process starts to winnow the field down somewhat, we will see more about ideas.  I'm not wild about Scott Walker but he brought some big ideas to his Governorship.  So did Kasich.  I'm hopeful Rubio will re-emerge but don't know if he has the support…..we'll see, starting on Thursday!