Oh when degree is shagged which is the ladder of all high designs, the enterprise is sick.  ...the primogeniture and  due of birth, perogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels but by degree stand in authentic place.  Take but degree away, untune that string and hark what discord follows.., Shakespeare

OK nothing to see here any more, the republican primary is a done deal.  It was fun while it lasted.  Romney will win the republican nomination for president, no doubt, but who really doubted it?  I'm bored with this 2012 stuff already.  I already have a clear idea who's going to win the general too, but that's another story and I'll try to keep my prejudice out of it.  But based on clear and irrefutable precedents let's just say it will be a great surprise if Romney loses the republican primary.  I'd say it's high time we start looking ahead to see if we can't determine who the likely candidates will be in 2016. 

The republican party is really extraordinarily predictable.  They are like the landed gentry.  I mean this more in awe than disrespect. Romney is the clear heir apparent for a party that adores structure even when it declares it doesn't, even when it thinks and says it is revolutionary and radical, it is still predictably hierarchical.  Hard to believe in this crazy, muddy, madcap democracy of ours with all the qualifiers such as money and innovation of policy and doubt and change and debate and personality and potential slip-ups and sudden upsets and shifting menus of concerns, that in retrospect the outcome of republican presidential primaries should have been so forehead-slappingly predictable before hand.
 
Look at the record: Romney was the presidential runner-up to McCain, right?  McCain as nominee was the runner-up eight years before to George W. Bush.  I guess you could say George W. was something of an outlier because he'd never run for president before, but you can hardly consider him an outsider when he's the eldest son of the last sitting republican president, eight years before, also named George Bush.  Wedged between these Bushes like a small frightened animal was Dole, the runner-up to George H.W. Bush.  He was in turn the runner-up and vice-president to Ronald Reagan who was himself runner-up to a sitting, albeit appointed, republican president, Gerald Ford. 

With all the thousand threads of variables, it seems persistence is the only key to merit and past position the only guarantor of future republican nomination.  The republicans always have an understudy in the wings readying himself for the next election, and its invariably the runner-up to the preceding nominee that gets the nod and it is always from that extremely exclusive pool that their next republican president, god and electorate willing, is chosen. But that paradigm which has endured the last thirty years is in danger, it won't endure another election.

The front runner for runner up right at the moment of this writing is Newt Gingrich.  If he wins he would have already destroyed the mold.  But if he comes in second he doesn't fit the republican structure well and wouldn't fit as a candidate in 2016 either.  I actually think Gingrich would be an interesting candidate for 2012 and one you can't say the republicans don't deserve, after all he's pretty much the horse they rode in on and republicans in congress are still heavily dependent on the slash and burn tactics he pioneered.  But he's a destructive force and though it's tempting to enjoy the satisfying spectacle of Gingrich doing to the republican party what he's already done his best to do to the country, the image of the Pillsbury dough boy coming to the nation's salvation on a white charger is not so wonderfully edifying a sight to the nation as it may have at first seemed in the backwater primaries of South Carolina. 

The republican establishment will have work fast to put him back in the box.  If they don't he will certainly split the republican party apart. Watching Gingrich work South Carolina must be what it was like watching Huey Long operate in Louisiana several generations ago.  Like Long he is portraying himself as something of a populist dictator.   But unlike Reagan who, when he challenged Ford, was seen to have been operating from a matter of principle, Gingrich can never really be seen as operating from anything other than from hubris and unprincipled ego, which does not wear well in the public consciousness the longer it is experienced.  After all, he's already said he would arrest any federal judge he disagreed with to keep them from their alleged dictatorial tendencies by embracing his own dictatorial tendencies greedily as a long lost lover. And he would put poor kids to work cleaning the latrines in our schools for wealthier kids in order to teach these unfortunates their subordinate status in our society early.  He can never achieve the same loyal runner-up status of Romney even if he comes in second this time as his ultimate recommendation for a position as front-runner next time.  

Because for all their current pseudo rebeliousness, the rebels without a clue impostures and hyperbole they employ, the republican rank and file adore authority. They relish being told what to do. They only hate and react against oppression when they are convinced that all the upsetting aggravation and uppityness is coming from outside or from down below, from the devils they don't know rather than the leaders they do. They revere and honor great wealth and power not as if it had been worked for and hard won but as somehow having almost been ordained upon those who possess it as if bestowed from on high.   

Republicans don't even mind, in fact they prefer, decisive class distinctions in their paternal world.  It fits with their orderly sense of things, which provides them a peculiar degree of comfort, security and even a sort of odd, vicarious privilege in this uneven, unforgiving and unpredictable age.  So if the wealthy should have, or grant themselves privileges that most don't have, pay fewer taxes and preach to the evils of sloth - no matter how lazy they are themselves - this is just the natural order of things.  Their rights are god-given, unimpeachable and worthy of deference almost no matter how much these gifts may have been latterly abused by their recipients. 

So who are the likely candidates for 2016?   Shaky as it now seems, let's place a predictive template atop our next presidential election.  If the past holds true we ought to be able to predicate the future on the past.  It should matter whether Romney wins or loses this upcoming election but only conditionally.  Republican heirs can wait eight years easy without losing their primogeniture status.  In 2016 then, if there is an open seat on the republican side the candidate should be the clearest runner-up in this year's primary - Ron Paul - some say.  That is at least if, as some predictions have it, he should persist this year throughout the entire primary process and  receive the second largest number of delegates (and of course not start a third party, disloyalty is never forgiven by republicans), he would be this year's runner-up.

But there's a problem, Paul is too old and though this may not be a point of absolute disqualification according to rules of primogeniture he is, well, also a little too crusty to be taken seriously.  So, and to their credit several conservative pundits and prognosticators have already suggested a sort of bait and switch, which  proves they know their party's tendencies and so - how about his son - Rand?  He would be the heir apparent of the heir apparent.  Nice, not perfect but perfectly acceptable under republican unwritten rules of republican primogeniture.

To understand this better it's sort of like saying the King of England should also be the King of France because his mother's childless sister was married to the Holy Roman Emperor seventy-five years prior to the death of his cousin the Duc d'Anjou whose marriage was officially annulled by Pope Leo XVII in a spat over the Albigensian heresy which enabled the daughter of his wife, a minor Hessian Princess by birth named Hildegard, to marry Peter the Great of Russia and ... well, you get the drift. It's very complicated stuff this primogeniture business.

But here is another possibility, the only other possibility that I know of if Romney gets the nomination.  That is Jeb Bush.  Bush boys have a long history - short in number of occurrences but long in duration of trial period -of lying in the weeds in wait like certain species of cicadas do until eight years after the last Bush was president, and then suddenly rising up out of nowhere and running and winning.  I mean by this, of course, George W. following after George H.W.

So here's my prediction, informed with the latest scientific knowledge and purest knock on wood certainty: Jeb Bush vs. Rand Paul for the republican nomination for presidency in 2016.   Of those two, I should give it to Bush over Paul.  The heir apparent, even second son heir apparent to an ex-president who is also younger brother to another former president, and also happens to be older than his rival, a rival that is a mere heir apparent to an apparent heir, should win easily.   For when in doubt, republicans honor age, duty and perseverance over a fresh face (ugh, the very thought! Gauche!) any day. A younger son of a past president should always be an apparent heir over an heir apparent whose parent hasn't been a president in the past.

Wow that's not too strong.  The strain is weakening.  Paul would at best be only a runner-up by proxy.  A Bush would be great but there is a difference between himself and his big brother, a sitting governor is in a stronger position to run for higher office than a former one who hasn't been in office since.  Gingrich?  Santorum?  Weak and weaker.  Two time losers.  The republican party as we knew it seems to be coming to an end.  The old coalition is fracturing.
   
But if Romney wins in 2012, then what happens? I would have to say I see the same race shaping up for 2020, such is the durability of my foresight and the predictability of the republicans, with one caveat.  It's possible that Romney would groom a strong VP who would also then have an apparent claim as an heir apparent, even though VP's aren't generally strong candidates on the republican side.  There was Nixon but he lost in '60 and then waited eight years (there's that eight year locust plague again, the famous eight year hiatus) before he ran again in '68 and won. Of course, there was also George Bush 1 who was not only VP but had runner-up status to Reagan in 1980 to bank on. This double primogeniture and dual heir apparentcy made him a perfect shoo-in for the republican nomination eight years on. But then there was also Agnew, Quayle and Cheney, enough said about them. 

And the democrats?  Who might be running in 2016?  Well there would be Biden, of course, but only if Obama wins not if he loses.  The only training for presidency among the democrats seems to be the VP to a seated president.   Democratic VPs are accorded considerable respect as candidates by their party such as Humphrey, Mondale (after a four year hiatus, remarkable for the dems) and Gore.  But they never win.  So Biden might have a tough row to hoe. Then there's Hilary Clinton.  Man or, I mean woman, she's a whole new category - not enough data, no precedents.  She might be a good choice but democrats don't have the shelf  life republicans do.  She was not only a president's first mate but also a runner-up for the nomination for presidency in her own right.  However, there's little example of democrats waiting eight years for a candidate to season before they'll vote for him - or her.  There are few examples of the same runner-up syndrome occurring on the democratic side that dominates the thinking on the republican side. 

So do I have a prediction as to who the democratic nominee for president will be in 2016?  Yes, Hilary Clinton, based on no precedent whatsoever, which is counterintuitively the only way one can predict the democrats.  But for 2020,  no way. No computer's large enough to weigh the variables.

Because often the democratic candidate comes in from left field.  Nobody expected Carter, Dukakis, Clinton. Kerry or Obama. There is no such thing as primogeniture or heir apparentcy on the democratic side.  There you just have one shot and it's a pure crap shot.  You have to pick your time perfectly, catch lightning in a bottle and ride a perfect wave to victory.  There is more magic to a democratic presidential nomination, though sometimes it turns out to have been a temporary spell from which the ensorceled electorate soon awakens, like a drunk from a binge wondering what the hell happened this time. There are no second acts in democratic politics whereas republican presidential politics consist of second acts almost entirely.