Already.
/headdesk
I've got Three Reasons This Should Be Illegal:
1) For the simple fact that NOBODY should be campaigning for an elected office so far down the calendar. I've railed a bit about this earlier, but I don't think I've gone into deeper discourse on it. Campaigning outside of the particular year of election is one of the reasons why campaigning costs have gone up: effort requires revenue, so the longer the effort the more money is needed. The more money is needed, the earlier candidates start with their fund-raising efforts to afford it all. It's a vicious cycle in a way, especially for House congresspersons who have only two years of office and are nowadays spending more time and effort campaigning for the next election cycle than focusing on actual governance. I've argued before there needs to be a time cap on this: all campaigning and fund-raising should only take place in the actual year of election for that office - in the case of Presidents, that fourth year of that cycle - which could go a long way to reduce the costs and thus the amount of money needed. (It might also have the added bonus of forcing state primaries for the Presidency to be within a shorter time-frame, hopefully to just one nationwide day)
2) This is distracting from the fact we've got a President NOW who's fighting with Congress over God-Knows-Everything to get a) our economy on track b) sanity back into our taxing/revenue system and c) actually getting sh-t done for once (I swear Congress has gotten lazier than a husband getting ordered to take out the trash). This game of "Who's Campaigning Now" seems to be a sad sick habit of our media who's more obsessed with personalities (aka "the buddies in our small circle of friends we'd like to see run the country because GOSH all Americans would LOVE our buddies!") than with policy (one word: too dry). Even during 2016's campaign we should expect the talking head pundits to start gushing over a buddy they'd love to see run in 2020. /headdesking times infinity THIS HAS GOT TO END.
3) Nobody nowhere and at no time should ever discuss any member of the Bush dynasty for ANY political office. NEVER EVER IN A MILLION GODDAMN YEARS.
I'm not a huge fan of Jeb Bush to begin with, I'll admit to that. Having lived here in Florida, I've seen his handiwork - the push for vouchers (bad idea), the push for charter schools (proving to be a bad idea), the purging of voter rolls, the sick campaigning stance on the death penalty (this one hit close to home, though it wasn't as personal for me as it was and still is for the people who were directly affected... it's not something I think I have a right to talk about, not right now... anyway I digress), and about 50 other reasons why I'm horrified Jeb is even talked as a serious candidate.
This is where Problem 2) becomes a problem again: these pundits have a personal connection to politicos like Jeb Bush, and so they can't see outside of their own circles why people could or would hate someone who's so "chummy". These pundits think "oh, Jeb's a serious guy on education" when his track record has been destructive to Florida's educational system and to the kids. They think Jeb can reach out to minority voters - especially Hispanics - but fail to realize that speaking Spanish and marrying a Latina is not outreach... and Jeb's track record on restricting voters' rights will turn off many Hispanics who see their own voting rights threatened by the current GOP.
Just being Jeb alone is a big reason why I hate him. What will really hurt Jeb Bush's potential campaign is that last name. His older brother George W. turned the name Bush into Mud. Even five years after leaving office, Dubya remains a hideously unpopular ex-President (even Nixon wasn't this hated five years later). All a candidate has to do is come up with a video ad using a picture of Jeb morphing into a picture of George W. That's all. And that would kill Jeb's campaign. I'm talking a REPUBLICAN Primary candidate has to create this ad: even the GOP base would be turned off by having yet another Bush anywhere near the White House. If a Republican opponent doesn't make that ad, you can be damned sure the Democratic candidate in the general election will: Hoover was the Democrats' whipping boy for two whole decades, for God's sake, and it worked because voters do have longer memories than the pundits realize.
So there. Three Reasons. If anyone starts talking up Jeb for 2016, you have my permission to arrest them. I think you'll have permission from 185 million fellow Americans too.
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