Jeb Bush never really had a chance
WASHINGTON • Jeb Bush formally ended his campaign for president on Saturday night after a dismal showing in South Carolina’s primary. But, it had been clear for months that Bush’s chances of being the Republican presidential nominee were close to zero.
How did the man who entered the race in the summer of last year as the clear favourite — with the famous last name, money at the ready and a resume of policy innovations and successes — wind up as an afterthought in the race long before voters actually started voting?
The reasons are many and complex but, at root, all come back to this basic fact: Jeb Bush is a fundamentally decent man who was badly miscast in the 2016 presidential race.
Bush was — and is — a softspoken policy wonk raised in a family that produced not one but two presidents. He is polite. You might even describe him as genteel. He is a rule-follower. And he is simply not all that into the campaigning end of politics.
Hi first forays as an actual candidate affirmed the sense that he just might be out of his depth. He was halting and awkward — at times seemingly baffled by the angry, in-your-face conservatism that confronted him on the campaign trail.
His allies insisted this was all the result of a bit of rust; after all, Bush hadn’t run for any office since 2002. He would get better, they insisted. Plus, his Right to Rise super PAC was on its way to raising US$ 100 million in the first six months of 2015 — an insurance policy against any problems Jeb might have as a candidate.
What no one in Bush world — most of all Bush himself — seemed to grasp is how much the Republican party had changed in the decade since he had left the Florida governor’s office. The presidency of Barack Obama had radicalized the GOP, making its base not only more conservative but more desirous of extreme rhetoric to counter the frustration and fury that Obama and his policies had created in them. The Republican base no longer wanted politicians who could offer up alternative policy solutions to undo what Obama had done. They wanted someone who would blow everything up. Everything.
Enter Donald Trump. Trump got into the race on June 16, one day after Bush — a remarkable symmetry given how big a role Trump played in Bush’s demise.
At the start, Bush — and virtually everyone else in Republican politics — regarded Trump as a sideshow, an entertainer whose bombastic rhetoric would go nowhere. Bush ignored him.
Trump, from the start however, was focused on Bush, who he dismissed as a “low energy” candidate relying entirely on his family connections. In many ways, Trump defined his candidacy as the antidote for Bush-ism: An anti-establishment truth teller who was dependent on no one other than his own deep pockets.
Trump’s attacks on Bush’s family — most notably his insistence that George W. Bush had not kept the country safe because of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — were a sign of just how deep his animosity toward the Bushes went.
It worked. By the time Bush and his team finally came around to the realization that Trump wasn’t going away and that the former Florida governor needed to take Trump on rather than ignore him, it was already too late.
For the last six months — at least — it was clear that Bush was effectively an afterthought in the race — passed not only by Trump and conservative favourite Ted Cruz but also, most gallingly for Bush, by his one-time Florida mentee Marco Rubio.
This was a wrong place, wrong time race for Jeb. He was never, ever going to win in a year like this one. Unfortunately, he realized that after suffering through a series of humiliations.