Does America Want a Two Family Dynasty?

For some reason American voters since the last half of the 20th century have shown a remarkable lack of creativity in their choices of presidential candidates. For instance on the Republican side there was been a Bush, Dole or Nixon on every presidential ticket except one since 1952 (they've also on a lot of those races too). At the presidential level we've had a Bush or Clinton in office since 1988 and prospects are pretty good that we'll have another Clinton for at least four more years (*shudder*). Does America really want family dynasties leading the country?

WASHINGTON - Forty percent of Americans have never lived when there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Anyone got a problem with that?

With Hillary Rodham Clinton hoping to tack another four or eight "Clinton" years on to the Bush-Clinton-Bush presidential pattern that already has held sway for two decades, talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate.

The dominance of the two families in U.S. presidential politics is unprecedented. (The closest comparisons are the father-son presidencies of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, whose single terms were separated by eight years, and the presidencies of fifth cousins Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, whose collective 20 years as president were separated by a quarter-century.)

"We now have a younger generation and middle-age generation who are going to think about national politics through the Bush-Clinton prism," said Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer, 37, whose first chance to vote for president was 1988, the year the first President Bush was elected. And as for the question of fatigue, Zelizer added: "It's not just that we've heard their names a lot, but we've had a lot of problems with their names."

And now, if Hillary Clinton were to be elected and re-elected, the nation could go 28 years in a row with the same two families governing the country. Add the elder Bush's terms as vice president, and that would be 36 years straight with a Bush or Clinton in the White House.

Already, for 116 million Americans, there has never been a time when there wasn't a Bush or Clinton in the White House, either as president or vice president.

Does a nation of 303 million people really have only two families qualified to run the show?

It is for this and many other reasons that I don't think a Hillary Clinton presidency is inevitable. There are lots of factors that may give voters pause as they decide the Dem nominee and general election winner. Hillary comes with lots of baggage.