If Hillary Hadn't Entered the Race

[Lyin' Steve]

I don't understand the enthusiasm for these people.  Americans who don't follow politics closely don't know who most of these people are.  Even those who do follow politics closely don't know who half of these are.  Few of them have any accomplishments.  Even the poster can't tell the Castro brothers apart so he put Julian twice.

Here is what most people know about each of these:
Julian Castro:  Hispanic guy we keep seeing being mentioned for VP on CNN but never heard of otherwise.
Russ Feingold:  Guy who lost his senate race and hasn't been heard from since.  He did that campaign finance reform bill so he was probably an important senator.
Antonio Villaraigosa:  The guy who made up his own voice vote at the DNC that one time... also the mayor of some city?
Amy Klobuchar:  Some senator??
Jim Webb:  That guy from Virginia who worked for Ronald Reagan
Martin O'Malley:  The guy who everybody keeps joking about how he'll never win.
Elizabeth Warren:  Harvard professor who beat Scott Brown, fights corporations, pretends to be a native American.
Kirsten Gillibrand:  The less important senator from New York
Andrew Cuomo:  Governor of New York, probably a lot like Mario Cuomo?  We liked him.
Tim Kaine:  That guy who's a big shot in Virginia.
Bill de Blasio:  Really tall, beat Anthony Weiner, police hate him.
Lincoln Chaffee:  His name is Lincoln and he used to be a Republican.
Deval Patrick:  Guy from Massachusetts, gets mentioned on CNN as a VP candidate purely because he can win the black vote.
Brian Schweitzer:  Who??
Mark Warner:  Some guy who used to be a senator in Virginia
Kathleen Sebelius:  The woman who screwed up Obamacare and got the federal government sued
Jeanne Shaheen:  Some governor?
Sherrod Brown:  Some senator?
Steve Beshear:  Who??
Bernie Sanders:  The socialist guy with crazy hair

People know:  Joe Biden, Al Gore, John Kerry.

Compare with the Republican slate... every Republican has heard of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Rick Perry... and they know Jeb Bush is George W. Bush's brother.

Now as for Democrats with a national profile...
Senators:  Cory Booker, Dick Durbin, Al Franken, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer.  Just by browsing this list I found out Warner and Shaheen are actually current Senators.  And I follow politics very closely.  These people are nobodies.
Governors:  Jerry Brown is the only democratic governor with more than 20% name recognition.
Rahm Emanuel could also make a run for it.

Seriously.  If Hillary hadn't gotten in, we might have a good democratic field, but it would probably look something like:
Cory Booker
Howard Dean
Chuck Schumer
Rahm Emanuel
Dick Gephardt
Jerry Brown
These are the real Democratic stars.  Anthony Villaraigosa?  Julian Castro?  Deval Patrick?  Kristen Gillibrand?  Nobody knows who these people are except political insiders playing the identity politics game.
That's not to say they're bad candidates... most of these are accomplished people who are probably presidential material (i.e. Deval Patrick was a two-term governor) but they are not the stars we imagine them to be.  Grass is always greener.  If it was a Howard Dean/Deval Patrick race, Patrick would be just another Jim Webb, a nobody with no national profile.