A Word of Thanks to Chris Sununu

Well, at least New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu made the right decision here:

That’s right: To paraphrase the immortal words of Richard Milhous Nixon, we won’t have Sununu to kick around anymore. Then again, I suppose we never really did.

It seems to me that prominent Republicans who decide not to run for the presidency despite having tested the waters for the last 6 months like Gov. Sununu has done are the real news here, given they are the exception to an increasingly absurd rule. If only Mike Pence and Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie and Doug Burgum displayed such good sense.

Who is this Doug Burgum I speak of? Why, he’s the governor of the great state of [checks notes] North Dakota! You know, that state with all the Bakken Shale oil and cold winters and colder winters and even colder winters. And snow. And did I mention a lot of oil? You betcha.

Doug Burgum is not going to be president. Nor is Mike Pence, nor are Chris Christie or Vivek Ramaswamy, and Asa Hutchinson is damn sure not going to get even into spitting distance of the office.

So, why are they running? Other than presenting themselves to Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis as potential running mates more preferable than Nikki Haley or Tim Scott might be, hell if I know. And what about those other declared candidates whose names I can’t even recall right now? Ok, what about them?

It’s all shaping up like 2015 again, when 16 traditional Republican candidates were declared, along with this guy everyone joked about, Donald Trump. Jeb! Bush was the presumptive nominee up until August, 2015, after all. He had the name, he had a giant war chest, he had the same game plan his brother had brought to the game back in 2000. The Republican establishment had decided it was Jeb!’s turn to be the nominee, and that was how it was going to be.

But then, the first debate happened in that election cycle, and Jeb!’s days were suddenly numbered. Oh, he managed to hang on through Super Tuesday, but ended up wasting a quarter of a billion dollars or so to win a tiny handful of delegates and end his career as a national joke (“please clap”).

So, you might be wondering, why couldn’t this year’s GOP nominating battle produce a similarly surprising win by an insurgent candidate, and it’s a perfectly legitimate question. My only answer to that is in the form of a question: Which one of the candidates I mentioned above has the charisma and shock factor of a Donald Trump? And even if one of them does possess those attributes, will they have the financial resources to take advantage of them?

Ramaswamy is a great speaker and an extremely smart guy who is right on most all the issues. But does he have the ability to spend half a billion of his own dollars to fund the lion’s share of a campaign, like Trump did? No, of course not, and he lacks the ability to even hope to raise that kind of scratch.

Sen. Scott has a compelling back-story and is also a great speaker. Which billionaire is going to risk a huge piece of his or her personal fortune helping Scott get his message out?

Christie’s just a blowhard hack who is wrong on 80% of the issues, and his years of being a talking head on network TV who often parroted Democrat talking points have left him with an image of a turncoat to well over half the GOP voter base. He’s just being funded to get in the race and go after Trump, nothing more.

Pence is about as exciting as a mayonnaise sandwich dipped in milk. C’mon, man.

Hutchinson and Burgum will become the GOP equivalents of Bill De Blasio and Eric Swalwell, a couple of guys whose reasons for running are complete mysteries and whose campaigns will be over almost before they begin.

The simple fact is this race is between Trump and DeSantis, and DeSantis waited so long to get into the race that he’s now left hoping the inevitable coming indictments against Trump by the DOJ and Georgia prosecutors do enough harm to the former President to enable his own campaign to catch fire and gain lost ground. All the others in the field are just so much irrelevant noise.

So, congratulations to Gov. Sununu for at least having the good sense to avoid becoming just more of that background noise. We all owe him a debt of gratitude, and he should be awarded with a juicy cabinet appointment by the next GOP president for his troubles.

That is all.