Found here. Short version: Jeb Bush’s endorsement does actually help Ted Cruz*. But, possibly more importantly… it’s effectively a message to Kasich that he should stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.
Moe Lane
*Yeah, if I had said that in March of 2015 all y’all would have looked at me funny. I would have looked at me funny, too. Since then… well, it’s been that kind of year.
Allahpundit, on Jeb Bush’s current strategy – and latest argument against Marco Rubio:
If that analogy is true, that Rubio is Obama and Bush is Hillary, it … doesn’t bode well for Jeb given how 2008 turned out for Clinton. The last time a national electorate was given a choice between a charismatic untested young pol who’s great in front of an audience and a more experienced pol whose main credential was her last name, with both in agreement on 99 percent of policy, they opted for the more dynamic candidate. Jeb’s theory is that Republicans, having learned a lesson from the Hopenchange disaster, will choose more wisely than Democrats did. But I don’t know. There are worse insults in politics than being compared to a guy who crushed the other party twice in winning the presidency.
Not taking sides – and I wouldn’t quite call 2012 us being ‘crushed;’ our down-ticket losses were frankly minimal – but… nope, still not taking sides. I will note that Wednesday’s debate should prove to be a lively time. Certainly it won’t be one of the snoozefests that the Democrats keep promising, then grimly delivering…
Because Jeb Bush has precisely the right idea, here.
[Jeb] Bush’s team has been quietly taping his private appearances in hopes of pushing back on false narratives dished by donors to reporters and to have a record to disprove any misinformation wafting from closed-door events.
“We want to have a full record of his comments,” said Tim Miller, a senior adviser to Bush’s Right to Rise PAC and the expected communications director for his expected presidential campaign. “Full information awareness.”
As the article notes, the idea here is to cut down on the number of incidents in 2016 where the media gets to spin an event without fear of contradiction. As the article also notes, the other idea here is to train the candidate into never treating an event as being off the record. That charming conceit is as dead as leaded gasoline. The sooner we all accept that, the happier we’re all going to be.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: I assume everyone understands that the Clinton campaign is too institutionally cowardly to set up something similar, right? – And that will cost them, at some point. I say that, serene in the knowledge that they won’t listen to me.
…and how you should ask them.
I suspect that these answers (via the Daily Signal) by Jeb Bush on immigration and Common Core questions will not much move the needle, one way or the other.
Jeb Bush is clearly a capable public speaker… but. He has some unpopular opinions on the subject, and that is the meat of it. Whether that hurts Jeb Bush in the primary any more than it has already is going to be the big question. Continue reading Jeb Bush and CPAC: how he answered some questions…
(H/T: Hot Air) I must say, this is a smart move: “As the American Conservative Union puts final touches on its annual political conference next week, they’ve offered potential Republican presidential contenders the option of a moderated question-and-answer session instead speaking from a podium to the thousands of activists in attendance… One White House aspirant taking the group up on the offer is former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Republican sources told Bloomberg Politics.” As long-time readers know, the RedState Gathering features something similar: our invited speakers are expected to take questions from the audience. We find that it works well, both from the candidates’ and the audience’s point of view, which is why we keep doing it. Interesting that the ACU is trying something broadly similar at CPAC*. Continue reading Jeb Bush opts to enter the lion’s den at CPAC.
It’s a significant point that I don’t actually have to tell conservative/Republican readers who GayPatriot is talking about: they would guess from the title alone that the subject is Jeb Bush. There are a lot of people out there who think that the wrong Bush ran in 2000*.
Personally, I’m not one of them – more accurately, when it came to the GWOT I’d rather keep GWB than all of the other possibilities** – but I also suspect that it doesn’t particularly matter, anyway: 2012 is probably too soon for the Bush name to be ‘rehabilitated’ in the public arena***, 2016 will be contentious either way, and the man will be 67 in 2020. For that matter, it’s not entirely wrong to be concerned that any one family should keep getting access to the Presidency: in 2008 we were facing a situation where the name ‘Bush’ or ‘Clinton’ had appeared on a winning party ticket seven times in a row, and up until Obama won the nomination it was threatening to be eight.
Well, there’s always the Senate in 2012. Going for Nelson’s seat should provide a good deal of panic, fear, inchoate rage, and general nastiness from the Online Left: so that’s something to look forward to.
Moe Lane
