Queens University of Charlotte/ flickr

Politico reports on what may be the most ridiculous trial balloon of this election and maybe of all time:

A group of Republican donors and strategists has been working to persuade former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to make an independent bid for president, according to a memo outlining the plan obtained by POLITICO Florida.

I can’t believe Rice would be foolish enough to entertain this for even a moment (the report says she is “reluctant,” and well she should be), but it speaks volumes about the incompetence and terrible political judgment of these “donors and strategists” that they think putting George W. Bush’s former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State forward as a presidential candidate is a good idea. Not only would Rice have all of the baggage from the previous administration, including the Iraq war most of all, but she also has a reputation of having been exceptionally bad at her jobs in the Bush administration. In addition to having no experience in elected office and never having run for any office, Rice has no major accomplishments from the Bush years that she can cite as proof that she should be president. She is linked to many of the most high-profile foreign policy failures of the Bush era, and as Bush’s foremost adviser on foreign policy she understandably bears some significant responsibility for those failures. It’s as if her supporters went looking for a candidate unacceptable to almost every constituency in America.

While her boosters are touting her favorability numbers, that rating would definitely change the moment that she became a candidate. Former Secretaries of State tend to have very high favorability ratings for some reason, but if they become politicians those numbers drop quickly. That happened for Clinton when she became a candidate again, and it would happen for Rice in the unlikely event that she went along with this absurd plan. If this is what anti-Trump Republicans end up being reduced to, they’re in even worse shape than I thought.