SC a bumpy campaign trail for Jeb Bush

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush speaks during a campaign rally in Charleston, South Carolina, February 15, 2016.

“I’m sick and exhausted of him going after my family”, Bush said.

Longtime GOP strategist Curt Anderson said: “Everything we know about political strategy suggests that Trump’s decision to attack George W. Bush will backfire”. Lindsey Graham asked if there were any Democrats in the room.

Jeb Bush’s verbal misadventures are not quite so wild and weird. (I wrote a piece on how that might be a miscalculation here.) Bush’s brother, former president George W. Bush, and his mother, Barbara, have been on the campaign trail in SC for him in the last few days.

And they’re telling him that to his face.

When quizzed about it, Bush responded, sarcastically: “It’s all been decided, apparently”. But like many other observers in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s – including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Madeleine Albright, and the entire U.S. Senate – Trump sounded the alarm about Iraq’s documented efforts to build nuclear weapons.

This is what all candidates say, and majority get out sooner rather than later.

As a matter of history, this is not quite true. First among them, would this have happened to anyone other than Bush? They told untruths with enthusiasm, and they used these untruths as part of their overall argument for war.

But no such reframing has really emerged that allows conservatives both to let go of the Iraq War while maintaining a sense of self-righteousness around the issue. The power vacuum left behind led to the rise of ISIS, and the demotic movements it unleashed in the Middle East have, over and over again, turned into disasters for US foreign policy. While it might gall him to endorse Rubio – his one-time mentee – that would be the “right” thing to do for the party. The people on Team Bush are far too experienced to seriously believe that wishing and hoping constitute a plan. This got a wildly enthusiastic response from the partisan Republicans in the hall. Strategists called it a boost to Rubio’s effort to consolidate the support of establishment-oriented Republicans and become the antidote to Trump. “And, in my experience, the strongest person usually isn’t the loudest one in the room”. Bash Trump. Show more emotion.

Bush and his staff deflected, sometimes not very deftly, questions about how much longer his campaign can continue before he cashes in his chips and heads for home. That goes for foreign policy and economic policy generally. But Jeb Bush, in public at least, takes an attack on the war as an attack on his mom and his dad and his brother.

Rove, now a GOP political consultant, is expected to be less combustible March 3 when he shares the Laurel Manor stage with President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election impresario Jim Messina.