2016 heats up: Brian Schweitzer and...Jesse Ventura?

Former Democratic governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, is laying the groundwork for a 2016 run against Hillary Clinton -- and he plans to run to her left, or at least to the left of Obama. (I knew it was a bad idea for her to join his administration.) Schweitzer says he can't think of a single positive thing Obama has done.

Last month, Schweitzer called Obama a corporatist.

He also warned that Hillary Clinton could do the same thing if she becomes president.

“The question that we have is, will it be the Hillary that leads the progressives? Or is it the Hillary that says, ‘I’m already going to win the Democratic nomination, and so I can shift hard right on Day 1,' " Schweitzer said in an interview with The Weekly Standard.

"We can’t afford any more hard right. We had eight years of George Bush. Now we’ve had five years of Obama, [who], I would argue, in many cases has been a corporatist,” the former governor said.

And now, here he is on Obama's list of good deeds:

“My mother, God rest her soul, told me ‘Brian, if you can’t think of something nice to say about something change the subject,’” he said.

But he couldn’t help himself, slamming Obama’s record on civil liberties (the NSA revelations were “un-effing-believable”), his competency (“They just haven’t been very good at running things”), and above all, Obamacare (“It will collapse on its own weight”).

Eventually, he paused to acknowledge Obama’s historic role as the first black president. But by that standard, Obama’s usefulness ended the day he took the oath of office.

I like this guy.

But you know who else is talking similar talk? Jesse Ventura.

A reader directed my attention to a British podcast called The Unexplained, hosted by a man named -- I kid you not -- Howard Hughes. Hughes seems a decent sort; he projects a much more reasonable and low-key persona than one would expect from an American broadcaster doing that kind of show. He had Ventura on the show to talk about the JFK assassination, which Ventura did with decidedly mixed results. The former governor spewed a lot of myths and iffy stories, buying into Judith Vary Baker's claims and spreading discredited data about the tramp photos. He also ignored the new and exciting document releases concerning Oswald's sojourn in Mexico. True, Ventura made many accurate statements about the assassination, but they all fell into the "JFK 101" category. Advanced students will yawn.

Incidentally, Ventura also thinks that Smedley Butler's War is a Racket is some sort of "banned" book. Nonsense. I've seen copies in bookstores plenty of times.

What really intrigued me were the former governor's strong hints that he might hop into the 2016 presidential race, running as an independent. Frankly, I don't think he'd be a bad president. (He wasn't a bad governor.) One thing's for sure: This former fighting man seems genuinely appalled by war, and I'm sure that he will be stone deaf when the neo-cons try to whisper into his ear.

But all such talk is silly. This man has no chance of winning. He claims to be an atheist, and Americans still are not ready to vote for an open atheist. (I think there have been a few presidents who were secret non-believers.) And he refuses to fly.

More to the point, the media won't take him seriously. The JFK business alone is enough to make him the target of endless ridicule.

Then again: If the media came to the conclusion that he would draw more votes away from the Democrat than from the Republican, he might get just enough positive coverage to unsettle the race. He won't win, but he could shake things up. On the other hand, I can see a situation in which Ventura might have a greater impact on the conservative voters.

Do you think there could be a "Ventura factor" at play in 2016?