As opposed to 2012 and 2008, in 2016, the Republicans are blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to presidential candidates.

We will see four or five well-rounded, successful governors who’ve proven they know how to make decisions and get re-elected, including Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, and Jeb Bush.  Throw in Chris Christie and John Kasich, too, if you like.

When the field is finally complete, virtually every candidate – with the exception of Donald Trump – will have something to offer, even those who have no hope of gaining the nomination.

Marco Rubio is the most impressive of the senators running, and seems to be a quick study with a broad range of knowledge.  Lindsay Graham has exactly one thing going for him – he’s serious about foreign policy – but even that’s something, and not nothing.  Rand Paul whose deep unseriousness about foreign policy is nevertheless matched by equal deep feeling about liberty issues, something more applicable to the domestic sphere.  Ted Cruz, for all of his lack of strategic thinking about the government shutdown, has argued and won cases before the US Supreme Court.  Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson know something about business and health care, even if neither has any business in the Oval Office.  Even Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who are well outside my band-pass filters for acceptable presidential nominees, both have a talent for showing the interdependence of social and economic issues.

In some respects, this success is the outcome of a decades-long campaign by the national party to cultivate state legislative talent, and develop a strong farm system.  The results have been high-water marks in both percentages of Republican state legislators nationally, and governors.  Whether or not that farm system can be extended further down to the low minors of city councils and school boards remains to be seen, but that’s a topic for another day.

So what happens if a Republican wins in 2016?  Typically, the response would be to look to the field of governors for executive talent, at the risk of robbing the farm system of its leadership.  In some cases, that’s not a problem.  A President-elect Perry could pick Scott Walker for his cabinet, knowing there was a popular Republican Lt. Governor behind him, and likewise, former governor Perry doesn’t have anything to do with Texas government any more.

But in other cases, it could be problematic.  Many of the candidates are young, and in a position to run for Senate (or for re-election to the Senate), and accumulate experience and seniority.  Cabinet positions are rarely springboards for further elective office.

What the Republicans could use is some way of making use of all this talent without pulling them away from their day jobs, or foreclosing options down the line.  Is such a thing possible?  President Obama has made liberal use of so-called “Czars,” but for all the sturm und drang surrounding these appointments that require no Congressional approval, it’s unclear what actual effect they’ve had.  The real power continues to reside in the cabinet heads and the White House itself, which is as it should be.  But it’s also possible that, as in the case of Valerie Jarrett, more influence is being exercised behind the scenes than we know about.

Of course, actual elected politicians won’t do anything like that without credit.  Could such a system be formalized in the face of institutional turf-protections?  And is it compatible with limited executive authority?

Probably and I could see it taking a number of different forms.  The National Governors Association or the Republican Governors Association could be asked to elect regional representatives (if indeed they already don’t).  The NGA already has policy committees for federal relations; while those currently represent state interests, perhaps they could be given a higher profile, turned over the term-limited governors who are looking for public successes and Washington experience in advance of the next elective step.

The legislative side may be a little trickier.  The Senate was jealous of its privileges, at least before Harry Reid tried to turn it into an extension of the Executive Branch, and a healthy return to Constitutionality would have respect, if not encourage Congressional independence.  Committee chairmen don’t like being bypassed, and may well just ignore weak liaisons.  And in any case, Senators are largely Made Men in this operation, have no term limits, and can, if so inclined, grandstand their way to at least temporary prominence.  But if the president persists, access to the White House or the relevant bureaucracies, and insight into the regulatory processes, can create power independent of the committee gavels.  As in show business, Senators don’t have to like each other, they just have to work together.

These ideas hardly exhaust the possibilities, but they’re a start.  They’d take a president supremely confident in his own abilities to lead, not only his cabinet, but also people who ran against him for the job, and who still harbor ambitions of their own, and someone capable of keeping those personalities in line.

Add that to the list of necessary qualifications when you’re deciding who to support in the primaries.

There hasn’t been a Triple Crown winner since 1978, when Affirmed and Alydar finished 1-2 in all three races?  Since then, there have been 13 horses who have won both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, only to come up short in the Belmont.  This year, American Pharaoh will either become the 12th Triple Crown winner, or the 14th recent near-miss.

Why has it been so long – 37 years and counting – since a horse was able to pull off the feat?

In part, it’s because of the variety of circumstances a horse must win in.  The races are different lengths, with different-sized fields, often raced under very different conditions.

But it’s also because owners and trainers race the Belmont differently.  Instead of running the race straight up, they often gang up on the Triple Crown hopeful, forcing it not to be merely Secretariat, but also Seattle Slew and Affirmed.  It’s a bill that’s almost impossible to fill; no horse can run all-out for a mile and a half without running out of gas somewhere down the stretch.  Smarty Jones, possibly the best Triple Crown shot this century, may have been the victim of this sort of racing.

This year, Hillary might be vulnerable to a strategy where Republicans run at her like the competitors in the Belmont, rather than like the Derby, with different candidates showing her not just inferior to them on specific matters, but simply not credible at all.

In foreign policy,even supporters cannot name a single significant achievement, and she faces challenges from the Republicans both from the left (Rand Paul) and the right (everyone else).  Painting him as irresponsible and out of touch makes the other Republicans look more serious, without reinforcing herself against their criticisms.  The world is a messier, nastier place than it was when Hillary became Secretary of State.  Those candidates with foreign policy expertise or experience will have no trouble pointing out that Hillary either successfully enabled disaster, or ineffectively fought against it.

Personally, people already don’t trust her.  Already, her plans for summertime Foundation-linked events and publicity have been shelved. Between the emails and the Clinton Foundation (and Bill’s shell corporations), the sheer scope of corruption and irresponsibility is something that Republicans will be coming back to on just about every issue.  People may be distracted for a moment by Denny Hastert’s distress, but she’d better come up with something quickly when the parry to her every answer is, “Did you check your foundation’s donor list before answering that, Mrs. Clinton?”  Everyone in country knows that “You can’t prove anything” is the response of the guilty, the sort of thing Spiro Agnew might have said.

And consider what Hillary must assume is her trump card – “Don’t you want to see a woman president?”  Every step of the way, Carly Fiorina has shown a willingness to confront, outthink, and disarm a frankly hostile media.  Fiorina won’t win the nomination, but she’ll deny Hillary that easy trip down the backstretch that winners like to have.

Colorado has seen the “War on Women” movie in multiple elections, with decreasing effectiveness.  The irony is that it was used to elect Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton.  The trope is starting to wear thin nationally, as well.  How ironic would it be if Hillary were unable to make use of it?

Even on her own side of the ledger, Hillary will have to face Democrats who excite the base, and remind them of what might have been.  It’s not uncommon for Belmont favorites to race other horses with the same trainer.  Owners hate that.  So will Hillary, because it will make her job of intervening in the Republican primary process that much harder.

Each of Hillary’s supposed strengths faces a challenge from at least one of the declared or likely Republican candidates.  It’s not a given, but maybe a probable twelve to seven, that kept on the defensive the whole time, and with no clear front-runner to target, Hillary won’t be able to do to the Republican nominee what Obama did to Romney – use early money to define him.

So the question remains: aside from the more obvious aspirations, is Hillary Clinton an American Pharaoh?

Governors, mostly.

We go through this every four years, and I certainly was taken by surprise in 2008 when both parties nominated senators.

This year, so far, it’s all Senators and a former Senator and Secretary of State.  (More on that later.)  Rubio, Cruz, and Paul are all first-term Senators, and given our recent experience with a first-term Senator-as-President, people are understandably leery of electing another one.

If Obama were the only point of reference, I might agree with those who say the comparison is a false one, but the fact is, we don’t have a great record with first-term Senators.  Starting after the Civil War, we have Benjamin Harrison, Warren Harding, and John Kennedy.  Those were the only Presidents elected either directly from the Senate or with the Senate as their only national experience, and they were all first-termers.  (James Garfield was elected from the House, but he really didn’t get much of a chance.)  None of them left much of a record, although it’s possible that two of them, if they hadn’t died in office, might have been re-elected for all that.

Harrison was a one-termer, losing his 1892 rematch with Grover Cleveland.  Harrison had a terrible economy working against him, but then as now, Presidents got the blame or credit for that, probably too much of either.  It wasn’t even a sure thing that Harrison would be renominated, although the obvious candidate, James Blaine, was too ill to run.  True, the executive hadn’t grown to its current, gargantuan proportions, but it was growing into its own, post-Civil War, and was coming to be seen as more important than it had been, with civil service reform a major, multi-decade issue.

Harding’s tenure is mostly remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal, and indeed, his administration appears to have rivaled Grant’s for corruption, although like Grant, Harding hired poorly, rather than to have been on the take himself.  Richard Epstein, about 10 minutes in on this EconTalk podcast, tries to make the case for Harding’s administration, and certainly compared to the frenetic Wilson, he made good on his promise of a “return to normalcy.”  It’s possible a reassessment is in order.  But part of governing is hiring and management, and on that score Harding seems to have failed (with the exception of Mellon at Treasury, which is no small thing).

Kennedy has been canonized by his untimely death, but the fact is the golden haze is mostly misplaced.   He had relatively few domestic achievements, and repeatedly got rolled by Khrushchev – first at the summit, then in Berlin, and finally with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He made up for it by getting us into Vietnam.

Obama’s been effective in getting some things past, but he’s had to make full use (and then some) of the powers granted the executive branch, and his only real legislative achievement came in large part because of a well-timed prosecution of Ted Stevens, and a variety of found ballots in Minnesota, which conspired to give him 60 votes in the Senate.  A Republican with real coattails in 2016 might pick up a couple of Senate seats, but given the map, is quite unlikely to get such a filibuster-proof majority to work with (although there’s always the chance that a Republican majority leader might follow the Democrat tradition and change the rules to suit his needs).

Of those who ended up President by succession, rather than election, two were legislators first, Truman and Lyndon Johnson.  We tend to think highly of Truman in retrospect, and much of that is based on foreign, rather than domestic policy.  Johnson, while a train wreck in foreign policy, and responsible for a vast expansion of the welfare and regulatory states (which is responsible for much of our current distress), could hardly be called ineffective.  He had spent decades in Congress, learning the ropes, and learning how to apply carrots and sticks, honey and vinegar, in proper proportion.  And of course, both were re-elected.

The last Secretary of State to be elected President was James Buchanan, a rank failure by any measure, inasmuch as the country split into two on his watch.  By that time, it was already becoming an uncommon path to the White House, although many had that ambition: Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Blaine, Seward.  Mostly, that was because the early Democratic-Republican Party established the office as the training ground for the Presidency, with Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams all moving directly from Foggy Bottom to the White House, and all directly in succession.  But Martin Van Buren would be the second-to-last one to make that move, and even then, he stopped off as Jackson’s second-term VP in-between.

He would be the last VP before George HW Bush to succeed the president he served in that role.  Nixon, Humphrey, and Gore all had close calls, but the only way most Veeps got to be chief executive was through succession, not election.

By far, the greatest number of presidents have been governors, and I confess that’s my personal preference.  Governors make decisions, senators make speeches.  Governors run offices, senators run their mouths.  There’s no place to hide as a governor, unlike Senate votes that can be calculated for effect, depending on who’s vulnerable on what issue.

Governors have to learn how to lead, how to work with legislatures, how to persuade, and what points to compromise on while advancing an overall agenda.  They have to make choices.  Effective senators do some of this, but are rarely in a position to have an overall view of where they want policy to go.

The good news is that Republicans have a deep crop of experienced governors waiting to enter the race – Perry, Walker, Bush, Jindal, Christie, Pence, Kasich.  That’s what happens when you build effective state machines, and when you focus on winning state legislative races.

While Hillary certainly has an imperial mentality, it’s unclear if she has an executive one.  And of the senators who’ve declared, only Rubio seems to have taken the time to truly educate himself on foreign policy.

As for me, I’m waiting for the governors.