It’s game on in the 2016 presidential policy wonk sweepstakes.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has the early lead — in publishing four white papers — with his latest tome out Monday on education reform. Rick Perry’s attempt to look smart continued last week in Washington, where the former Texas governor dined with a pair of Middle East specialists — Elliott Abrams and Eliot Cohen — at an expensive steakhouse a couple blocks from the White House. Then there’s Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who has attracted leading GOP heavyweights like Robert Zoellick and has tasked former Walmart CEO Bill Simon with hiring dozens of specialists who may need to move to … wait for it … Miami.


Next year’s election is shaping up to be the strongest on policy in recent history, thanks to a wide-open, issue-hungry presidential field and the promise that no matter who wins, 2017 may just be the year that the legislative logjam finally breaks and big things get done again in Washington.

And while it’s a year until the Iowa caucuses, all of the candidates need ideas — and fast.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is pulling together a team tasked with the challenging job of charting a new, post-Barack Obama path. It will be packed with party heavyweights (including her husband) with more than two decades of experience battling Republicans on everything from the environment to budget deficits.

Leading Clinton’s campaign team is John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff, fresh off his second tour at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where he was a counselor to Obama overseeing climate change and energy policy. Also in Clinton’s corner are former top State Department policy adviser Jake Sullivan and Neera Tanden, who led her 2008 campaign’s policy department and now runs the progressive Center for American Progress think tank originally established by Podesta and that’s widely seen in Washington as a second Clinton administration policy shop in waiting.

For Jeb Bush, the number of Republicans willing to help on policy is growing every day. Simon, a close Bush friend who served under him as head of the state Department of Management Services, has been interviewing dozens of policy experts eager to work for the next in a GOP dynasty, according to multiple sources familiar with the effort.

“He’s the one who everyone is chasing,” Stephen Moore, The Heritage Foundation’s chief economist and a close ally of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, said of Bush.

Also in Bush’s corner is Zoellick, the former World Bank president and U.S. trade representative, who has been advising him on foreign and economic policy, according to a source close to Zoellick. Glenn Hubbard, who chaired President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, has also spoken with Bush and in an interview had only positive things to say about the former Florida governor’s economic record.

“If you ask which candidate has a really good opportunity agenda, it’d be Gov. Bush,” said Hubbard, who has also met with Perry and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and declined comment when asked who he planned to formally support in the 2016 race.

No candidate wants to be tagged an intellectual lightweight at the start of the campaign season. After all, bad things can happen when a candidate fumbles a reporter’s question on measles vaccinations or U.S. troops on the ground in Syria. Going forward, the entire 2016 GOP field has no shortage of opportunities in the coming days and weeks to showcase its policy chops: Sens. Paul and Ted Cruz of Texas, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, are all scheduled to talk technology Thursday at a Lincoln Labs forum in Washington; Bush gives a foreign policy speech Feb. 18 in Chicago; and the hosts of the Conservative Political Action Conference later this month are urging all the candidates attending to talk about a specific issue area.

As they build up their issue portfolios, many of the Republicans are relying on a familiar cast of former GOP administration officials and Capitol Hill aides as experts for advice. Several policy experts said they are sharing years of pent-up ideas to any 2016 candidates that ask but are on the fence about committing to any one campaign.

“I think it’s just a question of whether I have an appetite to get involved in the primary and, if so, who shares my worldview and will do the best job for the Republican Party in competing against Hillary Clinton,” said Lanhee Chen, the former Mitt Romney 2012 policy chief, who confirmed he’s talked to several potential GOP campaigns, including Bush, Jindal, Perry, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and a couple of others.

Jindal, who last year said Republicans need to “stop being the stupid party,” continued his policy-minded rollout Monday with a 42-page report on education reform that includes calls to reduce the federal government’s role in schooling, new ways to measure teacher performance and allowing parents greater choice in where their kids go to class. “I don’t know how you get into a race this important without giving serious thought to these issues,” Jindal told reporters at a breakfast in Washington hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

America Next, a Jindal-led policy group, has a full-time policy director in Chris Jacobs, a former staffer for Jim DeMint at The Heritage Foundation. Asked who he’s relying on for ideas, Jindal named former Missouri Sen. Jim Talent as an adviser for a paper he published last year on defense issues and noted conversations he’s had with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and another possible 2016 contender, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

“There’s no one person I’d say, ‘This is the determinate influence.’ I prefer to talk to a wide array of people and make my own decisions,” Jindal said.

A Paul spokesman cited Stephen Moore as one primary economic adviser, though Moore explained that he’d also given advice to fellow 2016 presidential hopefuls Cruz, Fiorina and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. For foreign policy help, Paul is leaning on former George W. Bush State Department official Lorne Craner and Richard Burt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany and President George H.W. Bush’s chief negotiator for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Aides to Scott Walker wouldn’t name his outside advisers, though the Wisconsin governor did share writing duties on his 2013 autobiography with former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen.

Perry, meanwhile, is trying to overcome his reputation as a policy lightweight — the byproduct of his “oops” moment during the 2012 campaign when he forgot the names of the three agencies he was promising to abolish — through dozens of briefings on issues both foreign and domestic. Last week, he talked about the economy at his Washington, D.C., hotel with CNBC senior contributor Larry Kudlow and dined at Morton’s The Steakhouse with Abrams, a former George W. Bush deputy national security adviser, and Cohen, a military history expert who served as Rice’s counselor at the State Department.

Back in Austin, Perry political strategist Jeff Miller and Dallas-based economist Abby McCloskey have recently organized briefings for Perry with about three dozen experts on everything from the economy to the federal budget, energy, labor markets, taxation, education and immigration. Attendees say they were encouraged before meeting the governor to forward published articles so he could be ready with questions.

“It wasn’t just for show,” said one GOP policy expert who briefed Perry. “He was serious to try to learn and I think that’s commendable for a guy like him who, obviously, had some missteps in that area.”

For Christie, policy help frequently comes from Bob Grady, a Jackson, Wyo.-based venture capitalist and former George H.W. Bush White House aide who has been volunteering for the New Jersey governor since his 2009 election. Grady, a New Jersey native, helped draft each of Christie’s state of the state speeches, as well as both of his inaugural addresses. More recently, Grady has helped organize telephone and in-person briefings on domestic and foreign policy issues for Christie, including with Zoellick, Rice, Henry Kissinger and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass.

Christie also has policy help back in Trenton, including Regina Egea, his chief of staff who volunteered as a policy adviser on his 2009 campaign, and Amy Cradic, a deputy chief of staff and Cabinet liaison who has handled the New Jersey portfolio on energy, environment, labor, tourism, gambling, emergency preparedness, transportation and federal issues.

Rubio’s aides pointed to meetings the Florida Republican has had with both Hubbard and Abrams, as well as former George W. Bush Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman; National Affairs writer Yuval Levin; American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks and James Pethokoukis, an AEI columnist and former “Jeopardy!” champion. Talent, the former senator, also helped Rubio on a major defense policy speech he gave last fall. In the Capitol, Rubio relies on staffers Jamie Fly for foreign policy and national security issues and Sara Decker for domestic advice.

Cesar Conda, a former Rubio chief of staff, said the emphasis on policy so early in the 2016 presidential cycle is being well received and would go a long way for Republicans in differentiating themselves from each other and their nominee’s ultimate Democratic opponent. “2012 was really an issues-free zone,” he said. “There’s a vacuum out there. You’ve got to present an alternative. You can’t just be the anti-Hillary candidate.”