02/21/2016
Itâs a good day when Americans know they wonât have to face a Mexican First Lady in the White House. The Bush scion âsuspendedâ his campaign for President on Saturday after another terrible response from voters, this time in South Carolina.
Jeb! Bush was observed by Donald Trump as being âlow energyâ which must have struck voters as accurate because the charge lingered stubbornly. Perhaps Bushâs uninspired slow-walk to coronation was unappealing to the public.
Plus there was so much to dislike about Jeb! â the sketchy Mexican wife who uncomfortable with English, the druggy daughter, Jebâs mostly Spanish-speaking home. Jeb! campaigned as the Hispanic candidate, as if that would sell to Americans. The diversity/bilingual shakedown may appeal to some on the silly coasts, but not so much elsewhere.
Last year Jeb opined, âThe fact that Iâm bilingual, bicultural canât hurt.â
Actually, it can. Citizens are sick of elites who arenât patriotic. Americans are tired of being told that all cultures are equal when barbaric Islam proves the lie of that idea. Also associated with the one-worlder ideology is economic globalization (outsourcing plus mass immigration) which has been pitched as beneficial to consumers when it has killed millions of US jobs. Establishment Republicans like Bush love the global economy because it makes their billionaire donors happy.
Jeb! thought it was cute to peddle guacamole bowls on his campaign website â for $75.
Even Politico noticed that Jebâs characterization of illegal immigration as an âact of loveâ was ridiculous. Good bye, good luck and good riddance to Jeb!
Inside Jeb Bushâs $150 Million Failure, By Eli Stokols, Politico, February 20, 2016His closest aides failed to predict Trump and never changed course, guiding a flawed candidate into a corner he couldnât escape.?
Jeb Bush, the Republican establishmentâs last, best hope, began his 2016 campaign rationally enough, with a painstakingly collated operational blueprint his team called, with NFL swagger, âThe Playbook.â
On page after page kept safe in a binder, the playbook laid out a strategy for a race his advisers were certain would be played on Bushâs terms â an updated, if familiar version of previous Bush family campaigns where cash, organization and a Republican electorate ultimately committed to an electable center-right candidate would prevail.
The playbook, hatched by Sally Bradshaw, Mike Murphy and a handful of other Bush confidants in dozens of meetings during the first half of 2015 and described to POLITICO by some of Bushâs closest and most influential supporters, appealed to the Bush family penchant for shock-and-awe strategy. The campaign would commence with six months of fundraising for the Right to Rise super PAC and enough muscle to push aside Mitt Romney. There would be a massive, broad-based organizational effort to plant roots in March states at a time when other campaigns were mired in Iowa and New Hampshire. The plan outlined Bushâs positive, future-focused message with an emphasis on his decade-old record of accomplishment as Florida governor.
And it included several pages about the former Florida governorâs case to prosecute against top rivals â dire political threats such as Wisconsinâs Scott Walker.
The plan roundly underestimated threats: Bradshaw, his closest adviser and longtime defender, for example, told at least one campaign aide that Marco Rubio wouldnât challenge Bush. Besides, Bradshaw and other top advisers believed, it would be next to impossible for someone with so little experience to beat him. âThey thought there was going to be much more reverence and respect for the fact that Jeb Bush, a Bush, was getting into the race,â said one Florida-based supporter, an alumnus of Bushâs gubernatorial campaigns and former staffer. âWhen they got Romney to step aside, they figured everyone else would too.â
Most critically, the playbook, people who have read it tell POLITICO, contained nothing about Donald Trump, who would spend the next excruciating year turning Bush into his personal patrician piñata.
âThe rules all changed this year. It was all about taking on the establishment,â said a Republican operative close to the Bush family. âWhen youâre the son and brother of former presidents, the grandson of a U.S. senator, how do you run in a year like this? It is just a year of personality, not message. All of a sudden, there was no path for him. They just kept falling back on his record as governor, which is all he has â and no one gives a shit.â
Interviews with more than two dozen Bush insiders, donors and staff illuminate the plight of an earnest and smart candidate who was tragicomically mismatched to the electorate of his own party and an unforgiving, mean media environment that broadcast his flaws. The entire premise of Bushâs candidacy, these insiders tell POLITICO, was an epic misread of a GOP base hostile to any establishment candidate, especially one with his baggage-weighted last name.
And Bush, known for toughness and hard-work ethic in Tallahassee, just couldnât project the kind of Reagan-on-âroids strength demanded by Trump.
âThey were just captive to it,â one Washington-based Bush donor said. âAnd they didnât adjust very nimbly.â
***
By August, just six weeks after officially launching his campaign, the only thing Bushâs staff could agree on was the problem: Donald J. Trump.
Theyâd paid no attention to the New York celebrityâs launch in June, just a day after their own. In early August, well after Trump began to dominate news coverage of the race, they still believed he was a blessing in disguise who would deprive Bushâs lesser-known rivals the media oxygen needed to break through. But as Labor Day neared, Bush found himself on the defensive, peppered daily with questions from reporters asking him to react to Trumpâs hard-line positions and seemingly outrageous statements on immigration.
But almost immediately, Trump baited Bush into a fight, staking out a position to the far right of the Floridian by calling for an end to automatic citizenship to any baby born in America. He ridiculed Bushâs earlier comment that immigrants who come to the United States illegally do it as an âact of loveâ for family, and called him unelectable.
Bush fired back, poorly. He went on conservative radio and used the derogatory term âanchor babiesâ when making the case that he would be a tough enforcer of immigration laws â opening the floodgates of criticism.
The following week, inside a Mexican restaurant in McAllen, Texas, just a few miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, Bush compounded the problem he was trying to clean up when he explained rather didactically that he was referring to Asians, not Mexicans, whom he argued were more guilty of taking advantage of the countryâs birthright citizenship provision.
Inside his Miami headquarters, Bushâs senior staffers were coming to the collective realization that the race was veering out of their control.
But thatâs where the consensus ended.
David Kochel, the early state strategist initially hired to serve as campaign manager, and senior adviser Trent Wisecup, a protĂ©gĂ© of Murphyâs, suggested that Bush challenge Trump to a one-hour, live televised debate on birthright citizenship, perhaps on âThe OâReilly Factor.â The Fox News host, they argued, supports birthright citizenship, and his show would offer a high-profile platform for Bush to demonstrate his policy knowledge and articulate his more unifying message, bringing the contrast between himself and Trump into sharper relief.
But Bradshaw, the most senior figure in the operation, and campaign manager Danny Diaz couldnât be convinced it was a risk worth taking, according to high-level campaign staff.
Days later, on Aug. 25, Trump was on stage at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, when heoffered an impression of Bush and characterized him as âlow energy,â a critique heâd come up with after the first debate a few weeks earlier.
Bushâs team was stunned, first by the insult but then that it stuck. Kochel and Wisecup raced to respond and saw their already planned event that very same day â on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina â as the perfect opportunity for Bush to respond forcefully and directly to Trump. They envisioned Bush in Pensacola, Fla., speaking straight to Trump: âYou think Iâm low energy, why donât you come down here and talk to these people about how I took charge in a crisis.â
But once again, Bradshaw and Diaz couldnât be convinced. Trump, they decided, wasnât in Bushâs âlaneâ and so the campaign need not worry about responding to him. They went ahead with the event as planned, rolling out a two-minute video telling the story of Bushâs leadership during the hurricanes. The following day, the headlines mainly served to remind readers of another Bush with a less-heralded record on Katrina â George W. âOne Bush gets praise for his handling of hurricanesâ was The Washington Postâs version.
âThe Jeb people knew that literally every day when he was governor, heâd walk the steps of the Capitol at a jog pace,â one longtime Bush bundler and confidant said recently. âThe building was 30 stories high. Youâd hide because you wouldnât want him to catch you and make you walk the stairs. Heâd email you at 5:30 a.m. This was not at all a low-energy guy. It wasnât true, but it stuck.â
âThey got defined as âlow energyâ by a guy who took an escalator to his own announcement.â
***
Those pivotal days in late August were one of the most critical inflection points for Bushâs troubled presidential campaign â the moments when Bradshaw, Kochel and Diaz might have reconsidered the assumptions made months earlier and redirected their candidate. They didnât, because that redirection wasnât part of the playbook.
âYou cannot run a political campaign and not have the ability to adapt, to pivot,â one longtime Bush donor who has supported all five of the familyâs presidential campaigns. âTo sit there and say, âWe have a book,â just shows the immaturity.â