5 GOP candidates who should follow Jindal out the door

A young, good looking Indian-American governor decides to run for president. He’s a Rhodes scholar. He’s the first Indian-American ever to run for the nation’s highest office. If he’d been a Democrat, they’d have cancelled the primaries and declared him the nominee. He’d have had so much press coverage that the national news media would have gone into full TMZ mode and the average person on the street would know that his given name is Piyush.

{mosads}But, alas, Jindal was a Republican, which really sucked all the magic out of the whole First-Indian-American-to-run lede.

Jindal was nowhere in the polls, a card-carrying member of the happy hour debate club and his third quarter burn rate was a smoldering 144 percent. So, it seemed downright rational when he decided to cut his losses, suspend his campaign and live to fight for some other November.

One of the great ironies of this unprecedented GOP primary is that candidates are constantly lecturing voters on the dangers of electing Donald Trump while — at the same time — they unnecessarily stay in the race, accomplishing nothing beyond slivering off their own tiny portion of the anti-Trump vote. In the end, if Trump gets the nomination, it won’t be the fault of GOP primary voters; it will be the fault of those who put their presidential ambitions above the fate of the country.

Trump is currently clinging to a plurality of the vote, and he’ll continue topping the polls until several of the GOP contenders get serious about their chances and drop out. Imagine how easily Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would coast to the Democratic nomination if rival Hillary Clinton were 15 people.

Here are five Republican candidates who should withdraw for the greater good.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush (Fla.): Bush is the most obvious gummer of the GOP gears. His tone-deafness throughout the race has been astonishing. His new slogan — “Jeb can fix it!” — probably refers to his campaign rather than the problems Americans face. But one thing is for sure: He isn’t going to fix anything without a name change. He can hide the Bush name from his campaign paraphernalia all he wants, but he isn’t fooling Republican primary voters who have answered in poll after poll that they overwhelmingly want an outsider. The reason Bush can’t fix it is simple. It doesn’t matter what his beliefs are, what his policies are, or what he says or does. Republicans don’t want another Bush in the White House. Period. Wake up and smell the zeitgeist.

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.): There was once a time when Paul had more than 10 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, but that time is long gone. In the third quarter, Paul spent $4.5 million in a campaign push that somehow wiped out the majority of his overall support. The problem for Paul is that the more Republican primary voters get to know him, the less they like him. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) nailed it in the fourth debate when he called Paul a “committed isolationist.” Paul’s only strategy toward the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seems to be not attacking Iraq 12 years ago. (Great plan if you have a time machine.) The truth is, whenever Paul is asked about foreign policy, he talks about the past as a convenient red herring to avert Republican eyes from catching a glimpse of a Paul foreign-policy future. The problem for Paul and his dozen-year-old good ideas is that good ideas don’t get better with age; they merely become hindsight.

Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.): The graph of Christie’s poll numbers would make a great bunny slope for kids learning to ski. No sudden bumps to upset their fragile balance. No giant drops to send them careening through the air. Just a year’s worth of steady, gradual decline.

Christie is actually running a financially responsible campaign, unlike many of the candidates, but his problems aren’t financial. According to a recent Fox News poll, only 33 percent of registered voters believe Christie is honest and trustworthy. That’s the lowest number on the list. Two points lower than Clinton. In four debates, not one moderator (not even Republican wrecking ball John Harwood) asked Christie about Bridgegate, but that doesn’t mean the voters forgot.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (Ark.): If you’re an evangelical Christian conservative who likes unapologetic, fiery rhetoric, you probably like Huckabee, but you probably like Republican candidate Ben Carson more. Carson has managed to out-Huckabee Huckabee straight to the top of the polls, and as long as Carson is in this race, Huckabee doesn’t stand a chance.

Gov. John Kasich (Ohio): Kasich was polling at about 4 percent before the Fox Business debate. After his widely panned fiasco of a performance, after which Michelle Malkin diagnosed him with “an acute case of irritable mouth syndrome,” he will likely never set foot on the main stage again.

Zipperer is assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College.