Is the Bush family brand a liability for Jeb’s run?

The legacy matchup — Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton — has politics aficionados salivating, or recoiling, with the 2016 presidential votes almost a year away.

The former secretary of state, a prohibitive favourite to win the Democratic nomination, will not simply be coronated, as some anticipate. Already, there are internal frictions in Clintonland that recall her 2008 campaign.

The problems facing the former Florida governor are more in the open: For a candidate that much of the Republican Party establishment views as a strong front-runner, he gets surprisingly bad marks from voters. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll last month, Jeb was viewed positively by only 19 per cent of respondents; 32 per cent viewed him negatively. By contrast, Hillary had a 45 per cent positive and 37 per cent negative.

In two recent Bloomberg Politics polls, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the initial tests, are revealing. In Iowa, among likely Republican voters, Bush has a 43 per cent unfavourable rating — unusually high. In a tightly packed race, he finishes first among New Hampshire Republican primary voters. But he is viewed unfavourably by 50 per cent of the general electorate in that battleground state. Of the 22 possible presidential aspirants, only Donald Trump is perceived more negatively.

Bush’s backers counter that such early polls are irrelevant because the public does not yet know his achievements as a successful conservative two-term governor or his reputation as the most substantive politician in the Bush clan. If Jeb runs, these attitudes “will change when they get to know him and his record”, says Mike Murphy, a Bush political confidant. The negatives probably reflect views about his older brother, George W. Bush, whose presidency ended six years ago. “All they know” about Jeb, Murphy said, is that “he is the brother.”

Unsettling to some other Republican strategists is that the Bush brand itself may be problematic. The record of Jeb’s father, the 41st president, George H.W. Bush, has been re-evaluated more positively: He is credited with expertly managing the end of the Cold War, the successful first Iraq War, a budget deficit deal and passing the Americans with Disabilities Act. But those are distant memories for many voters, unlike George W. Bush’s presidency. The 43rd president remains decidedly less popular than Bill Clinton, his predecessor. In a Quinnipiac poll last year that asked who was the best of the dozen post-Second World War presidents, George W. Bush tied for last place, with only 1 per cent.

Jeb probably would have to try to strike some distance from his brother. The most noteworthy domestic achievement of Bush 43, legislation giving prescription drug benefits to senior citizens, is hard to embrace when Republicans are denouncing Obamacare. The Bush tax cuts led to soaring deficits and its jobs record is not one Republicans relish: Almost 21 million private sector jobs were created during Clinton’s eight years in office and there were 7.5 million in President Barack Obama’s first six years. Under George W. Bush, 463,000 jobs were lost.

On foreign policy, the conservative icon William F. Buckley once declared that president George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq was all-defining: “If he’d invented the Bill of Rights, it wouldn’t get him out of his jam.” That decision still looks like a jam.

On Friday, Jeb said he “won’t talk” about his brother’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the association may be hard to shake off. In Iowa, 50 per cent of Republicans said the strength of Jeb’s potential candidacy rested more on family connections than on his vision for the country or unique qualities; only one in five Democrats thought that was the case with Hillary and the connection to her husband.

The view was even more widespread in New Hampshire, where two-thirds of general-election voters said Jeb’s candidacy would be based on his family connections.

— Washington Post

Albert R. Hunt is a Bloomberg columnist.