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And We Thought Jeb Bush Was a Gentleman
From John Podhoretz’s latest in the New York Post:
Democrats have spent years raging about the rise of Super PACs and the millionaires and billionaires who fund them. Maybe they should start laughing instead, because the largest Super PAC in history may come to be best-known for taking down the Republican candidate who may have had the best chance to win in 2016.
On Thursday, we learned that 35 percent of the money spent so far by the Super PAC supporting Jeb Bush has been used to target the candidacy of his fellow Floridian, Marco Rubio.
According to Jeremy Peters of The New York Times, the anti-Rubio ad buys by Right to Rise (R2R) have totaled a staggering $20 million.
That’s $20 million out of the nearly $60 million through which the Super PAC’s honcho, Mike Murphy, has burned since R2R began its spending spree six months ago.
Jeb Bush could have left the stage as a respected former governor of one of the biggest states and the country and a completely honorable man. Now he risks being remembered as a bitter spoiler. This is unworthy of him.
Published in General
Complete amoral power hungry jerks with the proper pedigree.
Explain to me how the voters are stupid again? Uninformed? Bad judges of character? Easily fooled?
The public, frequently accused of being knuckle dragging low info dimwits saw through Murphy and Jeb faster than the elites.
Before he even gets to the point of trying to put things back together, he has to also take out Kasich, Christie, and Cruz, so that he can be the alternative to Trump. This may be his best strategy, but it’s a tough road from 6th place.
Mike Murphy runs RtR. He’s not part of the Jeb! campaign. I agree everything is co-ordinated.
Alright I will throw it out there. How much of this from RtR and Murphy is about giving Marco cover from charges of being the “Establishment candidate”? Think about it. Marco is pretty much Jeb, with some minor differences (Common Core being one of those), but the one issue that every single DC Republican wants (immigration) they are carbon copies. Jeb isn’t going anywhere and looks like the only way he is going to get into the White House is as a guest of the next President–likely even if it’s Hillary since they are best friends. So he and Murphy cook up this plan to attack Marco so when Jeb drops out and the race gets tighter, Marco can then make the case along with Trump and Cruz that the Establishment doesn’t like him much either. This plan would also explain why Christie, Kasich, and whoever else aren’t really getting hit by RtR. They aren’t going anywhere either. Marco is their best bet too, as you have all said in previous discussions. He presents the best bet to ensure victories down ballot because he isn’t a wild eyed crazy man like Trump of Cruz. He presents the best chance to get amnesty once sworn in (I would say within the first month, President Rubio with McRyan standing behind him, signs over the country to the third world). It’s all a ruse.
That’s one theory anyway.
I think “bitter spoiler” is a worthy epitaph. Sums up the Bush Clan legacy nicely.
What would you do with 20 million (besides buy 20 million PowerBall tickets)?
Yep. Put on your shocked face.
It’s the last dude standing strategy, if anything these half-wits put together could be called strategic. Throw money at negative ads at the person polling the highest, outside of Trump. Then throw money at the next person polling the highest, etc. Boil it down to a primary choice between Jeb and Trump, and there’s probably a 50-50 for Jeb, especially if people start looking at an actual choice between Trump and Hillary, which is surely a sign of The End Times.
We seem to do a perfectly predictable job of putting the least electable candidates into the nomination. See McCain. Bob Dole. The “next guy” disease.
For this disease, apparently the cure is more Mike Murphy getting paid a brickton of money to do not much of anything at all. Can I get that gig? I’m quite confident I can master the intricacies of the electoral college in under 8 minutes.
Well, all of the Bushes have a history of campaigning as dirty as they must so as to win. But afterward we get good governance from them.
NB: good governance doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with their policies. I mean to say they seem to execute policies that I disagree with as well as can be expected.
I love this so much I’m stealing this picture to use as my avatar, probably until after the election.
How so? It’s being done by his superpac, isn’t it? Even if he didn’t have a hand in its preparation, it’s being done in his name.
Personally I’m okay with it. I used to support Rubio, though I’ve always had concerns – he’s a little too establishment, the outsider who so desperately wants to be the insider – but his support for S.590 was the last straw. So if Jeb wants to use up his cash taking out another establishment clone whose foreign policy instincts seem a little too much like Bush 43 for my comfort, it’s probably the best service he could do in this campaign.
I’m tired of putting up Progressive Lite as the alternative to full-bodied progressivism.
Personally, I think Jeb doesn’t want to disappoint his dad when he’s so sick. If Bush 41 were to die, I suspect Jeb would drop out within a week or two. I can’t figure out any other reason he’s still in it. But of course, I don’t understand why there are still Marxists in the world, or why anyone buys into AGW, or . . .. it’s a long list.
I was surprised as well. I think that had Jeb shown any strength, Rubio would have backed out long ago.
Bush has been like that ‘Eye of Soron from Lord of the Rings’ this election cycle. We’ve all been going crazy under that sun/spotlight. That 120 million & that Rolodex he’d been sitting on has always been in the back of everyone’s mind. Nothing can grow until its destroyed.
There. I said said it. The Bushes are Soron!
I agree- this is Mike Murphy revealing his true colors; no wonder meg Whitman lost in California. And, don’t forget- the more money Murphy spends, the more he personally makes because he personally gets a cut out of all media buys. “Cost-plus-percentage-of-cost” contracting was outlawed at the Pentagon after WWII, but the scam still applies to old line political “consultants”.
Words cannot express how I have felt about him since the Bloomberg piece. The man is evil.
Murphy is sometimes overzealous in the pursuit of victory, and he is wrong about what is good for the country and the GOP. But he is very sharp and I always learn from his campaign analysis. If he were more conservative, he could be a real asset.
Right to
Risea 7 SeriesSo conflicted this political season, I must admit. While the moniker of “Establishment” and the pejorative uses we see so often these days turn me off, I am nonetheless genuinely angry that the leaders of the Republican party have been ignoring so many of our concerns. There is also some difference in “values” between those leaders and many of us, even though I am having a hard time figuring it out.
All that said, I wake up this morning hoping beyond all hope that those same leaders, including Bush, Rubio, Christie, Kasich, and even Fiorina, Carson and Paul, get together in a smoke filled room in Washington and pick one of them to consolidate behind to stop Cruz and Trump. With all the angst about whether Trump is worse than Cruz or the other way around, its 100% clear to me that they are both disasters in waiting.
Go “Establishment”! I feel dirty.
Sadly, I think this entire thread should be categorized as mixture of the “Anger” and “Acceptance” stages in the Kubler-Ross model of the Rubio campaign’s death.
In politics, like most competitive niches, the intraspecific fighting is fiercest.
Rubio and Bush are in the same lane, and Mike Murphy has $100 million.
After the initial attacks on Trump flopped like dying mullets what was Murphy’s next move?
Give the money back? Remember Garry Marshall in Lost in America? Trump voters are basically saying “I like Wayne Newton. That makes me a schmuck?”
Murphy gambled that Trump would as likely self-destruct as be destroyed, Cruz’s grating/condescending style and his 10% numbers wouldn’t improve, and that they needed to clear out the establishment lane which might contain 60% of the vote if those two gambles worked.
They didn’t.
And it really is nobody’s fault but Marco Rubio’s that he put himself in that establishment lane.
As much as I oppose Jeb and as much as I dislike Murphy, I think you’re right Herbert. Jeb is running for president; part of that includes taking out opponents. Obviously Jeb disagrees that Rubio represents the best shot for Republicans otherwise he wouldn’t have run, kept running, and continued to look forward to the next phase.
Bush thinks he has the right to rise to the Presidency, and is entitled to be the only Republican from Florida to run this cycle.
Meanwhile, having won key endorsements from Eric Cantor and Lindsay Graham….
For shame for shame. And I better stop there before I describe what I wish to be done to Murphy and Jeb with red hot pokers. Murphy always had that semi psycho edge…..
Many, many years ago I was precinct committee man and a delegate to the King County Washington Democratic convention. It was my first and last foray into politics. What I saw at that level was a microcosm of what happens at all levels leading to the National conventions of both parties. I left that convention early and took a long hot shower feeling the need to clean off the filth I was exposed to.
I have never been surprised by the behaviors of politicians at any level since. I realized that to reach their level they had to dive into the midst of that rats’ nest and somehow rise above the rest as the meanest, nastiest rat in the pack.
Jeb’s behavior is no surprise. To reach his current level he has he had to have a good deal of naked ambition. That kind of ambition is generally in inverse proportion to personal integrity.
As Mark Steyn recently pointed out
The honchos at Davos are seeing maybe a million times that many people on the move. The GOPe is on board with the internationalist/socialist/corporatist agenda that is part of what got Europe into its mess.
If Trump is our best bet to avoid the mess that’s coming, we’re in trouble. Oh, wait. We are in trouble.
exactly right
Well, waddaya know. Here’s a surprise:
The German government is unable to say where more than half of the one million asylum seekers allowed into the country have ended up, MailOnline can exclusively reveal.
Now where have I heard something like that recently? Oh, that’s right:
But that’s OK. It’s all acts of love. That should trump, if you’ll excuse the expression, Rubio and the Gang of Eight any day.
Meanwhile, Trump at least sounds serious on border security and immigration in general. Maybe he’s not. But if Trump succeeds, it will be with a constituency that wants better border control. The GOPe’s candidates are almost as hostile to that constituency as the Democrats are; Bush & Co.’s financial backers wouldn’t support them if they weren’t. Sure, that will will give the Democrats their demographic win. But the GOPe and their backers have been fine with that for decades.
Maybe that helps explain Trump’s appeal, and Bush’s desperation.
Its not unworthy of Jeb to do this – it is the completely predictable action of an entitled man who thought after 8 years of conservatives fighting their way out of the wilderness – a third Bush presidency was in order. Whatever the result of this primary, I hope one effect is the final exit of the Bush dynasty from Republicans politics, and the permanent political unemployment of Mike Murphy.
Try again when they reject the amoral power hungry jerk who’s leading the polls.
rubio vs. Jeb!
Popcorn!
Tee-hee!
Neither of these guys is crazy about Americans, that bunch of lazy slobs…
I think Peter, who knows both of these men personally, should write a personal note and/or pick up the phone and say these things to them directly.
Dear BThompson,
A good point. Don’t forget, it is perfectly possible that Peter has already done so.
Best wishes, all!