Who should be the Dem minority leader?

[orangecrush]

4. Obama for Speaker 2019!

Indeed, Barack Obama can't run again ... OR CAN HE???

Such is the question posed by this Change.org petition, which was ... well, it was posted by a friend of mine. It's called "President Obama: Run for Speaker of the House in 2018," and it outlines a practical and eminently constitutional path by which Obama could become the second-most-powerful elected official in America two years from now.

Here's the whole deal: The president's Chicago residence is in Illinois' 1st Congressional District, which is represented by Bobby Rush. If Rush were to step aside in 2018—not entirely implausible, as he turns 70 today and has served in the House since 1993—Obama could run for Rush's seat while campaigning nationally for other Democratic House candidates on the premise that he'd be selected as Speaker if the party won a majority. The Dems will need to flip either 24 or 25 districts to take the 218 seats necessary to control the 435-member chamber, and that currently seems like a long shot—but it'd be less of one with a popular national figure to rally around. Current House Dem leader Nancy Pelosi's national favorability rating is 28.5 percent, according to Huffington Post's poll aggregator; Obama's approval rating by the same measure is 53.5 percent. As the petition notes:

Barack Obama is leaving the White House with his standing nearly as high as it's ever been. He is by far the most popular politician in the country. In 2008 he beat John McCain in 237 congressional districts (as currently drawn), and today he's certainly more popular than Trump in a majority of the 435 districts.
Donald Trump, of course, lost the national popular vote and is the least popular incoming chief executive in modern history by a large margin. Speaker Obama would be a formidable national foil to President Trump, and not just for the attention he'd command from the public and the press. An Obama who occasionally speaks out about issues of public importance while mostly, like, working on his memoirs is one thing. An Obama with formal powers over the legislative process is another thing altogether, and the prospect of putting such a trusted figure in a high-leverage position would likely motivate midterm Democratic turnout more than anything Obama may be planning to do as a civilian.


http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/11/23/barack_obama_could_run_for_congress_become_speaker_of_the_house.html




A true right wing nightmare!