Charlie Cook, a veteran inside-the-beltway political analyst, recently wrote of a focus group discussing the 2016 presidential election. He observed that the conversation among 12 Colorado voters “would be jarring to anyone who assumed that the nominations of Bush and Clinton are inevitable.” Cook added, “When half a dozen voters in a conversation say they would back a law that would ban any Bush or Clinton from running, it makes you sit up and take notice.”

The jarring thing to me is that there is anybody who would be surprised by this response. In my decidedly outside-the-beltway world, I don’t know anybody who sees a Bush-Clinton race as inevitable or even likely. But Cook is a good observer of the nation’s political elites. So I accept his premise that a decent number of political insiders are counting on a battle of the family dynasties.