Jeb Bush is back at it. Apparently, Governor Bush has announced that his new campaign slogan (switched over from the painfully obvious, yet somehow still confusingly simple slogan ‘Jeb!’) to ‘Jeb Can Fix It!’
For the governor’s sake, hopefully ‘It’ refers to his own defunct campaign. In the last presidential debate Bush came out swinging and not necessarily for the better. One of the key mistakes, in my mind, that Bush made was to go on the attack against Marco Rubio – criticizing the Florida senator by saying that his running for higher office was taking away time that could be spent legislating and that perhaps he should forfeit his office.
That’s a fair point, I guess. A lot of politicians spend time outside of their elected offices and aren’t really upholding the standards of good government when they are running for another office. The problem comes in the second half of Bush’s remarks against Rubio when he made a joke about how Rubio has a loose schedule and works a “French work week”.
Hardy har har. That’s so funny I forgot to laugh. Bush managed to get a few chuckles from the debates crowd, but at the risk of sounding clever he left a big gap open for Rubio to sneak in and not attack, but to point out the obvious.
Rubio and Bush – both members of Florida government – had mostly been playing friendly throughout these debates, each talking to each other with the reverence that two people who have worked together can really talk to each other with. That’s where Rubio found his opening.
Rubio insisted that despite the fact Bush was going on the offensive and going after him, he would remain non-combative to the governor. That instead, he wouldn’t attack anybody and would stick to promoting himself.
By taking the high road Rubio threw perhaps one of the hardest punches of the night at Bush. To my mind, he revealed just how desperate a campaign that many had expected to become the frontrunner was reduced to an aging prizefighter that is just throwing blows to see what lands.
Some would argue that Bush was at an immediate disadvantage simply due to his namesake. But, what’s in a name? Bush’s early thunder was taken by Donald Trump. Unexpected spikes in the polls by Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina established a sort of precedent for this Republican cycle that the outsiders were going to be favorites and that political staples like Bush.
So what does he do now? He’s getting down and dirty. He’s going to start throwing the punches. Make noise to just make noise. In the debate, Bush said that he was going to pull a John McCain, meaning that he was going to have a surge from behind to take the nomination.
The problem with that? John McCain was never anything other than John McCain…well, until he hit the general election. But, on the campaign trail against other Republicans he was the same old John McCain who had always been. He never turned on a dime on other candidates and suddenly became malicious.
Sure, McCain would throw a jab every now and again, but it wasn’t as aggressively out of place as it is with Bush. I don’t necessarily feel one way or the other about Jeb Bush. I probably should. But at the moment he’s not worth feeling one way or the other about.
In all seriousness, I know that ‘Jeb Can Fix It!’ refers to the country – which I didn’t know was so broken it actually had to be taken in and fixed. But if Jeb Bush can’t correct his own campaign how is ever going to expect to get a crack at the White House and “fix” Washington?
Brian Laughran
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