On Saturday, Jeb Bush complained that he had “a lot of really cool things” to do other than run for president. He didn’t want to “sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them.” Gone, it seems, was the “joy in my heart” he had planned to campaign on.
The next day, he traveled to Texas to assure donors that he was doing just fine. CNN reports that the previous day’s crowd had been raucous and receptive, but these old family donors have good reason to be worried. Despite their amassing the largest war chest in the primary, the campaign has about as much money on hand as Sen. Marco Rubio, his former Sunshine State protege who is currently polling ahead in both their home state and nationally. Despite $15 million in advertising by his super PAC in New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina, Mr. Bush is third in New Hampshire, fifth in Iowa, and sixth in South Carolina. And despite raising a massive sum of money for a primary campaign, staffers were informed on Friday of across-the-board cuts to headquarters personnel, to pay checks and, despite best efforts, to morale.
But it should surprise no one — no one — that Mr. Bush and his massive campaign are flailing.
Twelve years of Bush Family Republican rule had produced first the purge of the Reaganites and the rise of the Clintons, then housing bubbles, bailouts, entitlements, education meddling, the tea party insurgency, and three wars — only one of which America convincingly won.
Oh, and President Barack Obama and the new ascendance of an American progressivism even President Bill Clinton had declared dead. Lest we forget.
Indeed, the only people who have ever seemed fired up for another round of Bush are the consultants and pollsters who convinced the governor that Americans were secretly, silently clamoring for his candidacy in hushed tones across the nation.
On Friday, those consultants and pollsters were among the junior staff caught in the campaign’s 40 percent payroll cut. The week before, Politico had reported that some of the senior staff faced salary cuts as high as $75,000. Then again, anyone who can take a $75k cut and still get by is doing fine in a modern America where half the working population earns less than $30,000 a year.
Early in the campaign — the “joyful” period, we’ll call it — Mr. Bush had pushed off comparisons to the father and brother who made Bush a household name. This weekend, both former presidents were airdropped in to keep wealthy family faithful from full panic. “This exercise in nostalgia,” Politico reports, “always meant to propel a third Bush candidacy, is instead laying bare how a family held in such high esteem by generations of Republicans no longer represents the party it once led.”
The Bush family has indeed led the GOP. A Bush has been on the Republican ticket for six of the past nine national elections. (The Clintons only managed three.) All the while, the United States has suffered exploding deficits, entitlements, bureaucracy and government control; and socialism is actually back in vogue as a high-polling alternative to the mess both parties have created.
The Bush family has led their party into a wilderness of their own creation. And when conservative voters finally say “enough,” the family will have only themselves to blame.
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