By James Taranto
Oct. 26, 2015 11:14 a.m. ET
107 COMMENTS
“If Jeb Bush’s campaign is struggling to stay afloat, he didn’t show it on Saturday,” CNN reports from Daniel Island, S.C. “A day after slashing salaries and cutting campaign staff, the former Florida governor got an enthusiastic reception and delivered one of his strongest campaign performances to date.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but we have another. Consider the most widely discussed passage from his Daniel Island remarks:
Bush got one of his biggest responses from the crowd when he lamented the state of politics in Washington and argued that [Donald] Trump is not the kind of leader that could break through the gridlock.
“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then . . . I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation,” he said.
“I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that,” Bush added.
This columnist shares Bush’s exasperation with the Trump phenomenon. Trump is vulgar, intemperate, ideologically unprincipled, all bluster and no substance. Maybe Bush is too much of a gentleman to criticize Trump’s personal attributes, so he makes the argument about process—“gridlock”—instead.
But the process argument makes no sense. “Gridlock” refers to the inability of a divided government to make legislative progress. The president’s priorities are anathema to the Republicans who control Congress, and vice versa, with the result that there is a lot of drama and little change from the status quo.
The remedy for gridlock is to end divided government by electing either a Republican president or a Democratic Congress (though not both). But no one, or at least no partisan, is against gridlock per se. Republicans were very much in favor of it in 2010, having seen the results of united Democratic government. And from a GOP standpoint, just about any Republican president would break the current gridlock in a congenial manner.
Trump is, to put it kindly, an ideological wild card, so he probably would be likelier than the other Republican candidates to object to some aspects of the congressional GOP’s legislative agenda. On the other hand, he prides himself on his deal-making ability. Perhaps he oversells that ability, but even that suggests a willingness to make deals.
The flip side of that, however, is that if the Democrats were to take Congress, say in 2018, Trump almost certainly would have fewer qualms about cutting deals with them than would a conventional Republican candidate. That’s a strong argument against nominating Trump—and it’s the opposite of the argument Bush made.
The tone of Bush’s remarks is even worse than the substance. It reminded us of “Saturday Night Live’s” Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis in 1988: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” That guy, of course, was Jeb Bush’s father, played by Dana Carvey—and Lovitz’s setup consisted of Carvey trying to run out the clock by repeating a series of platitudes: “Let’s stay the course. Thousand points of light. . . . Let’s just stay the course and keep on track. Stay the course. . . . On track, stay the course, a thousand points of light, stay the course.”
Listen to Trump being interviewed, and you can hear echoes of Carvey’s George Bush. This is from yesterday’s “Face the Nation”:
And, as you know, I have disavowed all PACs. I had many people setting up PACs for me. And we sent letters last week saying we don’t want—I mean, we respect them, we love them, assuming it’s all on the up and up, because I don’t know—these people who run PACs, I don’t know what they do with everything.
But, certainly, for the ones that are doing it with the right intention—but we disavowed all PACs, every one of them, John. And every candidate should do the same thing. This whole PAC concept is fraught with problems. And I think you are going to see tremendous problems with PACs over the years.
And I am disavowing all PACs.
Jeb can’t believe he’s losing to this guy.
Neither, one may assume, can the people who came to his campaign event in South Carolina. But Bush’s appeal has become much more selective over the past few months, and his rhetoric on Saturday seems unlikely to broaden it.
Worst of all is his exhortation: “Elect Trump if you want that.” If the polls are to be believed, a plurality of Republican voters are prepared to do just that. Bush’s sarcasm may be lost on them, in which case he has just encouraged them to vote for the guy to whom he can’t believe he’s losing. If they do perceive the sarcasm, they will likely also not miss Bush’s implied criticism of them. Politics consists in part in the art of concealing one’s contempt for the common man.
Bush’s I’m-too-good-for-this attitude—“I don’t want any part of it. . . . I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do”—will come across as entitled, a particularly unattractive quality in a political scion. We sympathize with the view that he is too good for it, not because he is a Bush but because he was a very good governor; and that the Republican electorate (again, if the polls are to be believed) is grossly undervaluing competence, experience and even principle. But however justified Bush’s feelings may be, it is impolitic, and a sign of weakness, to display them in public.
Before the event, Bush spoke with reporters. “Pressed with questions about Trump, especially the real estate mogul’s recent slipping in the polls in Iowa to Carson, Bush grew tired of talking about his rival. ‘I’m past Donald Trump,’ he said”—an assertion that, as CNN notes, “certainly wasn’t true.”
Asked about his campaign’s recent financial difficulties, Bush replied: “Blah blah blah, Blah. That’s my answer.” That’s actually not a bad answer, but “he went on to point to other candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton in 2008, who were expected to take their parties’ nominations but failed in the end.”
Mrs. Clinton is part of a political dynasty. Giuliani was a competent, experienced executive who led in early polls, but never finished better than third in a primary and ended his campaign with a whimper in Florida. For Jeb Bush, those examples hit awfully close to home.
