Mitt Romney formed a presidential exploratory committee this week. So did Rick Santorum. The pair joined fellow Republicans Tim Pawlenty and former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, who have previously gone the exploratory committee route, and Newt Gingrich who, in early March, launched "Newt Explore 2012," a website that proclaims he is "excited about exploring" the idea of running for president. I guess that means that likely-but-not-yet-in candidates Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Haley Barbour, Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels, and Sarah Palin are exploring the idea of exploring the idea of an exploratory committee. Since when did all this political Lewis and Clarking become the norm of running for president? It's like announcing that you're forming a committee to see if you want to marry your girlfriend. Either you want to commit or you don't. Why would we want to support a candidate who needs to explore whether he or she wants to lead us?
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Maybe they need to see who will help finance their run.
Maybe they need to know that they can now pay their daycare for the time they are running for office.
Maybe they are waiting for the house and senate to affirm a selected set of runners.
We all know that the party will select whom they chose to financially support.
After all, it's all in who you know, or who's back they scratched.
Watch and see.
Next month the party will come out and say they are backing two or three that need to run. Americans not in office will have someone shoved down their throats again. Watch and see.
Because most of them don't really want the job. They are just trying to figure out how to milk the most money out of their fans.
"Either you want to commit or you don't. Why would we want to support a candidate who needs to explore whether he or she wants to lead us?"
This phenomena (announcing that you're going to stick your toe in the pool to discover how the water is) is indicative of the extreme degree to which Society in the USA has deteriorated.
The previous POTUS (a President's son who used an Airforce Reserve jet to visit his girlfriend), continued the trend as President, satisfying his lust for Iraq's oil reserves by mobilizing the National Guard and sending the nation's youth off to war, while redirecting the nation's financial reserves toward private war contractors - and when those reserves ran out, he borrowed all that he could from Chinese Banks, devaluing the dollar and destabilizing the economy in the process.
All this set the stage for the entrance of Barack Obama, who promised change we all could believe in, only to fill his Cabinet with Banksters and appoint a Biotech Industry darling to head the USDA.
The People knew they had been had and reactionary movements like the T Baggers and Palin (and worse) became visible and some of them even took office (although Sarah left hers) - and began attempting to revert 200 years of social progress in the process.
Meanwhile, political opportunists like the nobodies mentioned here have began salivating and imagining that they have finally been called.
In 2008 I thought Dennis Kucinich was too short to be President but he has turned out to be a lot taller that the current ex-basketball star. It's going to take someone like Dennis or Russ Feingold or Alan Grayson to put the nation back on the right track - if Americans have enough sense to understand it, and vote accordingly.
Argument fail. It would be quite rational to form a committee and survey your friends and family to see if you should marry your girlfriend. Your friends and family will see things more clearly than you. The outcome will almost certainly be better. Perhaps only economists realize this. I'd rather have a presidential candidate that carefully considers all of the angles, and a number of perspectives, before deciding to run -- but then rationality is central to my world view.