Theresa May is...

...a member of the Conservative Party in Britain and the current UK Home Secretary. She's famous for coining the term "Nasty Party," to describe the Tories back in 2002:

"There's a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us – the Nasty Party."

From Wikipedia: 

The term "Nasty Party" applied to Conservative Party members with traditional conservative stances, which included lacking concern for the poor, being anti-gay and anti-minorities, and pro-business.

Many Conservatives felt this tendency was one of the reasons the Conservative Party lost the 1997 and 2001 general elections (before losing a third in 2005, and failing to win a fourth in its own right in 2010), and that the party needed to broaden its traditional base to have a chance of re-election.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, you may recall, was the Republican who said two years ago that the GOP "must stop being the stupid party." Ouch.

(You can write him off, by the way; people don't like being told they're dumb -- especially when they are.)

But you can also write off Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, even though James Downie, writing in the Washington Post, thinks Jeb Bush "should be worried" about him. It's a good piece, and Downie is right when he says:

Right now, Walker is the candidate who can most realistically unite the base and the establishment wings of the party.

But -- Pssst! -- Scott Walker doesn't have a college degree. He has a good spin on it, though: Walker left Marquette University in his senior year to take a job with IBM.

Do I care? Of course not. (College is way overrated.) Besides, I'm a Democrat and my opinion doesn't count. But would the "stupid party" (and it is the stupid party -- evolution, anyone?) really want to nominate someone for president in 2016 without a college degree? I doubt it. Vice president, maybe, but not president.

Corleone Olive Oil?

Really? I thought it was called Genco.

Jeb Bush is little more...

...than Mitt Romney redux: an establishment candidate who will probably get the 2016 Republican nomination with almost no support (or excitement) from the base and -- absent a recession -- will lose the general election to Hillary Clinton.

Next question.

The New Yorker cartoon of the day:

“I’m leaving early, before mission creep takes over.”

The Name of the Day...

...belongs to Sacvan Bercovitch, a professor of American studies who died at age 81. When I first saw that name I thought, Sac-van what? According to his obit in the Times:

He was born on Oct. 4, 1933, into a Yiddish-speaking left-wing family in a Jewish ghetto in Montreal. His first name is a combination of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists who many thought had been wrongly executed in 1927 for murder and armed robbery.

Imagine being so passionate about something that you would saddle your kid with a name like "Sacvan" for the rest of his life!

"Gee, Ma, couldn't you have just named me after Uncle Joe?"

Yesterday I focused...

...on Mike Huckabee's long odds (25/1 on Paddy Power) of winning the Republican nomination in 2016. Here's a little more reality for the former governor of Arkansas and his supporters: the smart money has Huck a 50/1 long-shot to win the general election.

To give you some perspective, that ties him with former senator Jim Webb of Virginia, above. You know him, right? He just announced an exploratory bid in November. How's it working out for him? In the most recent polls from Real Clear Politics, Webb trails Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination by an average of over 60 points!

In other words, Mike Huckabee has about as much chance of getting elected president as Jim Webb. (But there's always vice president, I suppose.)

With all the hoopla...

...this week over Mike Huckabee's probable run for president in 2016 (in which I have certainly contributed in my own small way), it's important to note that according to Paddy Power (the best reality check I can think of at this point in the campaign), the odds of the former governor of Arkansas winning the nomination are still only 25/1 -- exactly where they were last week. That has Huckabee tied not only with Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry, but also with Rob Portman (who's already announced he's not running) and Michael Bloomberg, whom I haven't heard mentioned as a possible candidate anywhere.

The top five leaders remain:

1. Jeb Bush 9/4
2. Marco Rubio 11/2
3. Rand Paul 6/1
4. Chris Christie 13/2
5. Mitt Romney 10/1