Jeb Smith’s Pros and Cons
All alterations in candidate names were my own alteration just to put a different light on the situation
If Jeb Smith does run, he may face Hillary Jones on the Democratic side. Now, a “Jones vs. Smith” contest doesn’t exactly thrill many people…
Jeb Smith and Hillary Jones are both somewhat tame and moderate politicians, driven more by political consultants and polls than by any burning personal ideology. Both are familiar with the concept of “triangulation” in politics. To put this another way, we might wind up with a 2016 race of “the bland leading the bland.” Still, it’s hard to see either one of them not instantly becoming the frontrunner in their respective party’s field on name recognition alone. How good a candidate will either prove to be, though? It’s worth taking a look at the pros and cons each will bring to the race, in an early look at what their campaigns will likely have to overcome. Today I’ll be weighing Smith’s pros and cons, and later in the week I’ll do the same for Hillary Jones.
Jeb Smith’s Positives
The biggest positiveSmith has as a Republican candidate is his family. No, not his father or his brother or even his mother but his more immediate family. Smith’s voice within the Republican Party on the subject of immigration is pretty unique, because he married a Mexican woman (the mother of his three children) and speaks fluent Spanish. That right there could earn him millions of votes that other Republicans could never even hope to get. There are two prominent Latino Republicans who will also likely run, but both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz aren’t exactly seen as prominent voices for the Latino community. Both Rubio and Cruz are of Cuban descent, which (because of Cubans’ unique and favored immigration status) doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight with Latinos outside Florida. This is before even touching upon their political positions. Smith actually lives up to his father’s concept of “compassionate conservatism” when it comes to immigration (he married a foreigner who became an immigrant, so this is no surprise), while Cruz and Rubio are fighting to stake out the harshest possible position on the issue. Rubio tried being somewhat reasonable on immigration in the Senate, but when he heard the outcry from the base, he quickly denounced his own immigration bill and decided to take a more absolutist position. To put it another way, Cruz and Rubio aren’t going to manage much in the way of Latino outreach in 2016, but Jeb Smith certainly could.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/jeb-bushs-pros-and-cons_b_6330710.html