I guess we're doing this again? Morning show host and coffee chain pitchman Joe Scarborough has a book out, about how the Republican Party can save itself by being less angry and extreme, and trying to do more to appeal to "swing voters" and "moderates." Scarborough has been giving lots of interviews about his book and its very original thesis. Ronald Reagan is on the cover of the book. Now people are asking Joe Scarborough if he is going to run for president, and he "won't rule anything out." He should. He definitely should rule it out, as soon as possible.
Now TPM says that Scarborough will be among the potential candidates in a survey taken at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in New Hampshire. That doesn't really mean a whole lot. It's not "proof" that Scarborough is dumb enough to actually run for president. He is, hopefully, just indulging the 2016 speculation to promote his book. But if he does even slightly well in this poll -- and Northeast Republican Leaders are probably the closest thing to Scarborough's "crowd" in the modern GOP, so it's not impossible -- there will be a lot of very insufferable words written, by the sort of people who appear or want desperately to appear on "Morning Joe," about how Scarborough could make a serious run for the presidency. Mike Allen and Dylan Byers will say that "insiders" are "buzzing" about Scarborough 2016.
OK. Let's be absolutely clear about this: Joe Scarborough is not a serious potential presidential candidate. That is nonsense.
The people who write credulously about candidate Scarborough tend to imply that because Scarborough is a television host, that he has built-in national name recognition and popularity. That is not actually true. Scarborough's show is popular among people who follow politics closely. Most Americans don't. And so, most Americans are watching something else most weekday mornings. Among Beltway (and New York) political journalists and media people, it is not a huge stretch to say that "everyone" watches "Morning Joe." But in the real world, only a couple hundred thousand people watch it. That's (a lot) fewer people than watch "Community." I'm not trying to harsh on Scarborough's ratings, I am just trying to explain that the man is not, by normal standards, a huge television talk show star. He is more like the most popular local news guy for the Acela corridor.
Meanwhile, a million people watch Fox's brain-dead morning program. Based on popularity as measured by ratings -- a decent measure of popularity, I think -- Joe Scarborough would be a less successful political candidate than Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and the Rev. Al Sharpton. In a Republican primary, in any state, for any office, nearly any Fox News host -- probably even that old rascal Shep Smith -- would almost certainly beat Joe Scarborough.
Suggesting that Scarborough run for president because political junkies like his show is like saying a "Crossfire" panelist should have run for president in 1992. Except that when that actually happened, it wasn't a total disaster. Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter turned TV pundit, ran for president three times. The second time, in 1996, he actually won New Hampshire, and came in close in Iowa. Still, he didn't win. What can Scarborough learn from Buchanan's campaigns? What made Buchanan a popular enough figure to actually win Republican primaries, beating the more experienced choice of the party elite?
Well, he was not a moderate pragmatist. Just not at all. The key to Buchanan's almost-victory was that he was an outspoken white populist (and, in certain respects, white supremacist) who ran as the true conservative, opposed to the Washington establishment. He expressed anti-free trade beliefs that white working-class voters weren't hearing from any other candidate in either party. He went big on the culture wars. His campaign semi-jokingly referred to its supporters as "the peasants with pitchforks." It was, essentially, a proto-Tea Party campaign. That's how Buchanan came close (though never that close) to winning the GOP nomination for the presidency: by doing exactly the opposite of what Joe Scarborough believes Republicans ought to do to win.
It is hard to believe that Joe Scarborough, coastal pro-business "moderate" who works for MSNBC, would do as well as Pat Buchanan, populist anti-corporate member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, in a GOP primary campaign, even in 2016. A third-party or independent run would be a colossal waste of time and money. Please, stop suggesting that this could actually happen.
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