Election 2016: What and Who's Left?

By Rich Kozlovich

Timothy P. Carney published an article entitled, Can Cruz kill King Corn? He noted in the article "the ethanol lobby is getting scared. The ethanol mandate has no clearer enemy among top-tier presidential candidates than Ted Cruz. And in Iowa, where ethanol has for decades held a mystical sway over politicians of all stripes, the clear front-runner in next month's caucuses is Ted Cruz."

He goes on to say. "If Cruz wins Iowa, especially if he wins big, it will confirm that the subsidies and mandates for ethanol are very important only to a sliver of the population (largely the lobbyists and executives of the giant agribusinesses that receive the lion's share of the benefit).......A Cruz win in Iowa would show that all the other politicians who pandered to ethanol lobbyists were fooled."

I predicted in 2013 Cruz would be the candidate when very few people every heard of him and now I'm predicting he will take Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. And for the very reasons he outlines in the article about Cruz's views on, among other things, subsidies. So what's to happen in Iowa and after.

Let's do some comparisons.

Christie is an arrogant blow hard with one hard conviction - "I'm important!" He's not! Rubio will not take Iowa and I think finish third . If that's so his campaign will nose dive leaving Cruz as the top candidate because Trump can't take either Iowa or New Hampshire.

If Trump loses Iowa his numbers will crash...although I've been saying that for some time and he keeps making me wrong. But he's still the voters "up yours" candidate and I don't care what the polls say, that won't last - although he's lasted longer than I thought I think it's been to the advantage of Cruz.

The American public loves the fact someone is standing up to the PC crowd and the leftist media. He's verbalizing how people feel, and now they feel they have the right to do the same. Now the leftists in both parties and the media are no longer laughing because he's making a fools of them because he just doesn't care what they think, and Americans love it. But that doesn't make policy, and his conservative rating isn't at all good. Under normal circumstances no one can say the things Trump has been saying and last, but he has, and he's cleared the path for Cruz.

Here's the current or ex-governors: Bush, Chrisie, Kasich and Huckabee - all false conservatives. Conservative Review ran eleven point scale measuring the 11 remaining viable candidates views on:

•Budget, Spending and Debt
•Civil Liberties
•Education
•Energy and Environment
•Foreign Policy and Defense
•Free Market
•Health Care and Entitlements
•Immigration
•Moral Issues
•Second Amendment
•Taxes, Economy and Trade

Currently there are eleven supposedly viable candidates left and eleven points of policy in which they were evaluated by Conservative Review. That means there's 121 possible times they could be rated as solid conservatives in combination, yet all 11 candidates combined only had 37 solid conservative positions.

That means they scored “bad” or “mixed” 84 times. On average - in combination - 11 candidates could only be solidly conservative 3.7 times. As for those 37 solidly conservative positions - Cruz had 10 of them, with one “mixed. But when you take Cruz out of the equation you find they could only average 2.8 solidly conservative positions among the lot of them.

Rubio came in second with 7 solidly conservative positions. So let's take Cruz and Rubio out the the equation! That means there were only 20 solidly conservative combined positions the other nine candidates shared, bringing that average down to 2.2.

Nine candidates who claim to be conservatives can only account for 2.2 positions that are solidly conservative, and eight will be out after Iowa. Better governors like Walker and Jindal, who had far more to offer than Bush, Christie, Kasich and Huckabee, read the tea leaves early and dropped out. And those four could only muster 5 solidly conservative positions combined.

Bush had 0, Christie had 1, Huckabee had 3 and Kasich had a grand total of 1. Among these so-called conservative candidates they could only average 1.25 solidly conservative positions. That's multiplying 11 points of evaluation with 4 candidates. That's 44 times they could have had solidly conservative positions. They have 1.25.

Fiorina has a 0 conservative rating, with 7 "bad" ratings and 3 "mixed", but it really doesn't matter. Bush, Fiorina, Carson, Huckabee, Christie, Kasich, Santorum, and Ron Paul will be out after Iowa, or just lingering around with zero support, like Graham did for way too long, and for reasons I don't understand. I often wonder - maybe they just don't have anything else to do?