Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The common ground guy?

Near the top of the news today is the twitter sent out by Jeb Bush that he is considering running for the Republican nomination in 2016. Folks on the right of center are not happy. Jeb told Ben Smith in 2012 that Ronald Reagan -
as would my dad -- they would have a hard time if you define the Republican Party -- and I don't -- as having an orthodoxy that doesn't allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground," Bush said, adding that he views the hyper-partisan moment as "temporary."

"Back to my dad's time and Ronald Reagan's time --they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support," he said. Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did."

Ben Smith writes:
The notion that Jeb Bush is going to be the Republican presidential nominee is a fantasy nourished by the people who used to run the Republican Party. Bush has been out of a game that changed radically during the 12 years(!) since he last ran for office. He missed the transformation of his brother from Republican savior to squish; the rise of the tea party; the molding of his peer Mitt Romney into a movement conservative; and the ascendancy of a new generation of politicians — Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, among them — who have been fully shaped by and trained in that new dynamic. Those men occasionally, carefully, respectfully break with the movement. Scorning today’s Republican Party is, by contrast, the core of Jeb’s political identity.

In that, Jeb is like ex-Republican Mike Bloomberg and like the failed GOP apostate Jon Huntsman: He’s deeply committed to centrist causes — federalized education, legal status for undocumented immigrants — that alienate key Republican groups; and he’s vaguely willing to go along with vestigial conservative issues that Republicans don’t care as much about, like standing up for Wall Street (Jeb was on a Lehman Brothers advisory board before that bank’s collapse, and now sits on a Barclay’s board) and opposing marriage equality, a stance he’s sought to downplay by focusing on states’ rights.

Smith's conversation with Jeb occurred at the
Bloomberg Tower for a board meeting of the personal foundation of the former New York mayor, whose aggressive campaigns for gun control make him, after President Obama, perhaps the most hated figure among pro-gun Republicans. The foundation’s focus includes two particularly bitter pills for Republicans: shutting down coal-fired power plants and campaigning globally for the kinds of new taxes on junk food whose introduction in New York City infuriated the right.

Jeb is one of the nation’s leading champions of Common Core standards, a move toward nationalizing America’s patchwork education; his foundation recently launched an ad campaign promoting them. The move is driven by a broad consensus of labor and business groups, as well as philanthropists like Bill Gates, but it has proven intensely unpopular with a Republican base generally suspicious of federal control and specifically focused on local autonomy in education.

“I guess I’ve been out of office for a while,” Bush told Fox News this week. “So the idea that something I support that people are opposed to, it means that I have to stop supporting it if there’s not any reason based on fact to do that? I just — maybe it’s stubbornness, but I just don’t seem compelled to run for cover when I think this is the right thing to do for our country.”

Jeb’s visit to New York in 2012 was a relatively rare outing to the non-Sunday show press, and as the quote suggests, he found himself making news that he didn’t intend to make, losing control of his image to the speedy, Twitter-driven political conversation before we’d finished our fresh-squeezed orange juice. Politicians are at their root in the media business — they’re communicators, distributing words, videos, images, and ideas — and it was painfully clear as he spoke that Jeb (like Bill Clinton) was a man of languorous 1990s media cycles who had little sense of the fragmented new one.

Are Republicans going to be content to go with a moderate, big government known name? As Smith writes, Jeb may be a Mitt Romney in the best case scenario, but in the worst case scenario, he may be
Mitt with a dollop of Fred Thompson, the halfhearted victim of a halfhearted draft.
Read more here.

Ace of Spades adds:
Oh: And the new news is that, allegedly, the Bush Brand is a now a benefit rather than a hindrance, as George W. Bush (and his dad) have risen in public esteem (or just fallen in public antipathy).

I don't have as much of a problem with the Bush Brand as other people; I have a problem with the Jeb Bush Brand.

I think it's absurd for a candidate's main selling point to be how much he hates the party whose nomination he's seeking.

I have literally not heard this guy say One Thing he likes about Republicanism or conservatism. All I hear is is List of Ways In Which We've Disappointed Him.

Well, I've had six years of one entitled narcissist telling me I have to elevate my game to gain his (His?) approval.

That's enough for me. I've had a snootful.
Read more here.

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