Just sayin'

Some folks seem to think that John Kasich hasn't entirely given up the idea of challenging President Trump. Mark Sanford, whose bizarre behavior while governor of North Carolina raises its own questions, is said to also be considering it. And so is former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake.

The part of me that is realistic says better Walsh than Trump. Better Sanford than Walsh. Better Flake than Sanford (if only because, his name aside, he's much less flaky than the others I've mentioned so far). And better Kasich than Flake.

Except, of course, none of them has a snowball's chance in Houston.

Right now, as I ponder the very real possibility that the choice I may face next year will not be Trump and Joe Biden but Trump and Elizabeth Warren, part of me is slipping into panic mode and thinking in much the same terms I thought after the Republican convention in 2016: I'm simply looking for a voice, for a place to stand. Trump is unthinkable. Warren is pretty close to unthinkable and clearly worse than Hillary Clinton (and come to think of it, so are the remaining Democratic options after Biden and Warren). Weld and Amash really aren't all that thinkable.

Walsh and Sanford are barely thinkable.  Flake is pretty thinkable. Kasich would be the most thinkable of the possibilities for me if he were to change his mind about running- or would be if not for the futility of the gesture and the necessity of abandoning the Fall challenge I'd still like to see him make if he contested the president's renomination.

Of course, he almost certainly won't do that.

Joe Biden, gaffes and all, remains the front-runner for the Democrats. Maybe the president's inevitable mockery of those gaffes would put his own into sharper focus, though I suspect that anyone who would even consider voting to re-elect Mr. Trump is deaf to any bizarre, untrue, or comically erroneous thing the president might say in any case and those who are honest and paying attention are already fully aware that when it comes to foot-in-mouth disease Mr. Trump is a far, far more advanced case than Vice-President Biden.

But my gut tells me that it's going to be Warren. The fanaticism of the moment, with the party faithful of both parties striving to be even more extreme and even more strident than the party faithful of another, tells me that those huge crowds Sen. Warren is drawing tell me that I'll be facing, if anything, an even more unthinkable choice in 2020 than Evan McMullin rescued me from having to make in 2016.

Maybe Flake will run. Any challenge to the president from within the party would be futile even if the party apparatus wasn't actively working to make such a challenge as difficult as possible. The polls tell us that 80% of the Republican rank-and-file support Mr. Trump, and I don't see that changing.

But it certainly would be nice to have some kind of voice, however soft, and some kind of a place to stand, however narrow, at some point in 2020.