The Republicans usually have a Presidential candidate in waiting, someone who’s more or less “next in line.” In 2008 it was John McCain, since he’d lost to GWB in the primaries in 2000. In 2012 it wasn’t quite so clearcut, but Mitt Romney had competed in 2008 and lost to McCain, so the party fell into line after flirtations with a half-dozen lesser-known lights.

The 2016 campaign, though, is shaping up as wide open. Some of the men who ran in 2012 are trying again, but none of them save Rick Santorum did very well in the primaries in that campaign. So here it is May of 2015, 18 months from Election Day, and the Republicans have three already-declared candidates in Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. None of them have distinguished themselves in the Senate; Paul and Rubio both arrived there in 2011, while Cruz first took office in 2013.

Today we got two more candidates, and the story is that a third (Mike Huckabee) will announce this week as well. Today’s crop was Ben Carson, a highly-regarded neurosurgeon with a penchant for saying outlandish things and then whining that the “politically correct” crowd is mean to him, and Carly Fiorina, a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, noted mostly for laying off some 30,000 people and arguing with the company’s Board until they forced her out.

Hoo boy. I hope the rank-and-file party member looks at these people with as much disdain as I do. I can’t imagine any one of them in the Oval Office except as a guest.