We have already had two decades of Bushes and Clintons in the White House, but they have only faced off once. Bill Clinton beat the senior George.
Now we have Bush son #2 in line to challenge the former first lady for the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And the former first lady is leading in all the polls. These early polls can be deceiving -- the Democrats are more united behind Hillary Clinton than the Republicans are behind Jeb Bush. Jeb is facing a full slate of opponents for the GOP nomination, while the Democrats are a quiet bunch.
The vice president, Joe Biden, visited Iowa last week and is headed to South Carolina. Bernie Sanders is headed to Iowa this week on a three-day swing. In April, Maryland governor Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb, former senator from Virginia, will speak at an AFL-CIO event. That's it for the Democrats, unless you count the effort to draft Elizabeth Warren.
A recent poll of Iowans showed that the family connection is an advantage for Hillary.
Thirty-five percent of Iowans do say they're less likely to support Bush because he's the son of George H.W. Bush and the brother of George W. Bush. Fewer Iowans, at 18 percent, called Hillary's marriage to Bill Clinton a reason to not support her.
Jeb will have a year and half to separate himself from his his brother's image and show differences. Of course it won't to be hard to show that he is not as dumb as George W., although he did exhibit some Bushisms this week in Chicago.
"As we grow our presence by growing our ability to produce oil and gas, we also make it possible to lessen the dependency that Russia now has on top of Europe."
Huh?
When talking about NATO's influence in the Baltics, Jeb explained that "I don't know what the effect has been, because, you know, it's really kind of hard to be out on the road, and I'm just a gladiator these days, so I don't follow every little detail."
So maybe he isn't that much smarter.
Thinking back to the nineties, I remember that I wanted Hillary to be president instead of Bill. I suspect many progressives felt the same way. Then came the Senate years, and she slipped a little in my view, although her voting record prior to her last two years in the Senate was very good. She was either rated at either 95 or 100 percent by Americans for Democratic Action until the last two years. Even then, she voted only once each year against the ADA position. She missed many votes while out campaigning, so her rating plunged to 70 percent in 2008.
The vote that probably did the most harm for her image with progressives was her vote to authorize the Iraq war. She has since admitted she was wrong and has apologized for that vote. While I was looking over her voting record, I did notice two important votes in 2008. She voted against FISA and immunity for telecoms. I remember that Obama, who was then a senator, voted the opposite way. The votes took place in July, so Obama was still campaigning for the White House and Hillary was not. That is significant because her vote was not influenced by presidential politics. If Hillary had been the presumptive nominee she would have been advised to vote for FISA to show she would be tough on defense.
It is a sad thing, but conventional wisdom in political circles is that for a woman to be elected president, she has to overcome the obstacle of being seen as soft on defense. Maybe those days are coming to an end, but that was what I learned as a political science major 30 years ago.
While in the Senate and during her 2008 campaign for president, Hillary Clinton attempted to distance herself from her husband's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. The problem now is that while serving as secretary of state she was involved in negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP as it is known to many activists, also sometimes referred to as NAFTA on steroids.
In her recent book, Clinton wrote, "It's safe to say that the TPP won't be perfect. No deal negotiated among a dozen countries ever will be -- but its higher standards, if implemented and enforced, should benefit American businesses and workers." That appears to be her latest position on free trade.
Now, that will be a huge opening for labor to support Clinton's opponents in the race for the 2016 nomination.
Jeb Bush has a different set of obstacles to jump to distance himself from the presidential records of George Bush senior and junior. His father lost to Bill Clinton, who proceeded to leave the country with a budget surplus -- before Jeb's brother left the economy in a shambles. Hillary will be able to argue that Democrats, including her husband, left the economy in much better shape than the last two Bushes who ran the country. Jeb also will have to overcome criticism of his brother's foreign policy.
While he tried to start distancing himself from his father's and brother's foreign policy in a speech this week in Chicago, recent polls have shown just how daunting an obstacle he has in front of him.
In the latest CNN/ORC poll, 64 percent think Jeb Bush represents the past while 33 percent say he represents the future. It doesn't help that the team he has assembled to advise him on foreign policy includes George Shultz, James Baker, Michael Chertoff, Tom Ridge, Steven Hadley, John Negroponte and Michael Hayden. Oh, and did I say Paul Wolfowitz?
Yes, that Paul Wolfowitz, the one who likes to use spit to hold down his hair.
A bunch of other neo-cons are on the new Bush team, same as the old Bush team. Hmmm, where is Dick Cheney, why didn't he make the team? I am also reminded of a 2010 interview with Candy Crowley, in which Jeb said he was the only sitting governor who never disagreed with President George W. Bush. When Crowley followed up and asked if he disagreed with anything his brother did as president, Jeb said "I didn't back then, and I'm not going to start now."
On Wednesday in Chicago the former Florida governor said: "I love my father and my brother. I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make, but I am my own man." He went on to say that mistakes were made in Iraq by both his father and brother. Maybe he should try getting advice from people who didn't lead them down the wrong path.
In another recent poll in Iowa, Hillary leads Jeb by 10 points. It's no secret that I still hope Elizabeth Warren saves us from a Clinton nomination, but I must admit a return to the Bushes scares me a lot more than a return to the Clintons.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
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