Jeb’ll fix it” is the latest mantra of Jeb Bush’s flailing campaign. Whatever problem America faces, Florida’s former governor has the nous to solve it. Alas, Jeb’s reinvention as a regular Joe with a toilet plunger is unlikely to fix his own campaign. Just one in 25 Republican voters now support him. Big donors are looking elsewhere. At some point, there will be autopsies. Proximate causes will leap out (his awkwardness on the stump would rank highly). Yet it is increasingly clear that his campaign was doomed before it began. No matter how hard Jeb tries to distance himself from the Bush name, it cannot match how far he needs to go.
Jeb’s quandary has been brought into sharp relief by Jon Meacham’s biography of his father, George Herbert Walker Bush. Destiny and Power is a fitting title for a patrician who took America’s reins just as it was sealing its cold war victory. Ask almost any student of diplomacy — American or foreign — and they agree that Bush 41’s presidency is underrated. The Soviet collapse could have turned nasty. Bush senior guided a peaceful lifting of the Iron Curtain and spurned the unanimous advice of aides to appear on the Berlin Wall as it was collapsing. He did not want to dance on the grave of Russia’s empire. Nor did he wish to hijack Germany’s moment.
By today’s standards, Bush senior’s restraint would qualify as electoral malpractice. Yet it showed the quiet confidence of a superpower that knew history was on its side. Europeans remain grateful for Bush senior’s handling of the end of the cold war. Most Republicans, on the other hand, recall him with disdain. He is famous for saying “read my lips: no new taxes”. Among conservatives he is notorious for having broken that pledge in 1991 when he pushed a budget that raised taxes to reduce the US deficit. It was a statesmanlike act that proved electorally costly. It also sowed the seeds for the anti-establishment Republican backlash that is now engulfing his son.
In politics, it is not what you say but what people hear. Branding his campaign “Jeb!” has not fooled anybody. What they read instead is “Bush?!”
Jeb’s bumper sticker was hollow. It implied that he had thought through which parts of his family legacy he would repudiate. Yet, even now, it seems he has little idea. Last summer Jeb took five attempts to answer the basic question of whether he would have emulated his brother’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was clear that he had not thought it through. At first he said yes: George W Bush had been correct in invading Iraq. Then he switched to yes, probably, but he would have focused on better handling the invasion’s aftermath. Then he decided he did not like answering hypotheticals. Finally, he came up with the formula that if he had known then what we know now — that the invasion would unleash chaos and hand Iraq to Iran on a platter — he would not have gone to war. Voters had stopped listening by then. What they heard was his brother’s legacy messing with his head.
Even now, Jeb cannot handle a Bush question without stumbling. Passages from the Meacham biography in which Bush 41 puts the blame for what went wrong with Bush 43’s presidency on his “iron ass” vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the “arrogant” secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, have dragged Jeb once more on to awkward dynastic terrain. The timing could hardly be worse. The book is officially launched tomorrow, which is when the Republicans will stage their fourth presidential debate. Jeb has done badly in the first three. In one, he insisted his brother “kept America safe” after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This was in response to criticisms from Donald Trump, of all people, who said the Iraq invasion was a disaster. When Trump is attacking your family for being too bellicose, you know you are in trouble.
It is theoretically possible that Jeb will pull off an improbable comeback. Money will carry him some distance. But the big dollars are starting to switch to Marco Rubio, Jeb’s former protege, and Ted Cruz, the Texan -hardliner. Mr Rubio, 44, has differentiated himself by running a forward-looking campaign that argues that the US needs a new generation of leaders to handle its 21st-century challenges. The young senator’s future tense has been widely contrasted with the rest of the Republican field, which looks back to “make America great again” (Mr Trump), to “revive America” (Ben Carson), to “reignite America” (Mr Cruz) and so on.
In fact, Mr Rubio is not alone. Jeb Bush, too, has crafted a future tense message that promises the “right to rise” and that pays as much heed as Mr Rubio to America’s middle-class crisis. Few have noticed. Jeb promises 4 per cent growth “as far as the eye can see”, to treat the US as an “emerging nation”, and a new openness to immigration - “we come in 34 different flavours”, he said. The case he makes for Bush 45 is about the future. But voters keep seeing the past. Even if Jeb were a skillful -campaigner, he has arrived too late at the family party. Perhaps he should have listened to his mother. “There are other people out there who are very qualified,” said Barbara Bush two years ago when asked if Jeb should run. “We’ve had enough Bushes.”
— Financial Times
