The problem with dream candidates is that you really can't tell if someone is a dream or nightmare waiting to happen until they've held a fairly parallel position. I don't usually consider the senate an ideal parallel because there's no leadership aspect to that though a lot of senators used to be governors or major metropolitan mayors, or CEO's or generals and such which is enough for me. Ditto CEOs and Generals have the leadership experience but rarely the legislative familiarity and that's kind of important. Anyone with that background who is reasonably conservative and appears to have a relatively clean past and a decent knack with people generally works for me, but that's a pretty small pool. My absolute ideal candidate would be a first or second term senator who was previously governor of a fairly purple or blue state and managed a reasonably conservative voting record and gubernatorial accomplishment list. Alternatively a governor who was previously a House member or served in their own state assembly works fine too.

That's not a small list but it's not too large either. But that was the general reason a lot of us liked Tim Pawlenty for the big chair. The field's pretty diminished not because we don't have a lot of R governors but because we lost a lot of the purple states in '06 and '08 and got most of the ones we got back in '10, it's hard to evaluate someone's performance as a governor in a year. Alternatively guys like Rick Perry or Butch Otter or Dave Heineman really only proved they could win a gubernatorial primary and not fuck things up so bad as to be ousted from places where even most elected Dems are NRA members and pro-lifers. A president who can't work with the other side is useless. If you look at our various Purple state winners though, guys like Rick Scott (FL), Rick Snyder (MI), John Kasich (OH), Scott Walker (WI), Tom Corbett (PA), or Brian Sandoval (NE) those are the guys who picked up battleground states where winning the primary doesn't ensure election so long as you don't utterly fumble. They are all new, Kasich and Walker have been hit hard, the others might get beat down too. Snyder seems to be doing well in Michigan thus far, but that oculd easily change. Of those, Sandoval and Corbett strike me as having real shots to move to the national stage. But I would guess that if we lose in 2012, at least a couple of those names will be popping up in the 2016 primary. I like a lot of them for VP candidate but I like Rubio more and none of the Hard R governors really bring anything to the table, except by demographic which right now besides Sandoval would just be the female governors which would just seem like Palin Episode II. But I don't really do dream candidates, partially because I don't really approve of anything that smacks of hero worship except on people who are dead or term limited out.