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In Defense of Mike Murphy…
It seems this week that Jebworld donors, surrogates and hangers-on can’t go two minutes without shouting to the press about their strange (and conspicuously relative) respect for Donald Trump, or whispering to them about their grave concerns over Bush consigliere Mike Murphy’s handling of Right to Rise, Jeb’s outside muscle.
Now leaving aside the dynamics of this temporary alliance with Trump, the grousing over Super PAC strategy is absurd on every level. Let us examine the telltale paragraph from Politico:
POLITICO interviewed nearly two dozen Right to Rise donors and Bush supporters, and all blamed Murphy for a super PAC strategy that has failed to boost their struggling candidate. Multiple advisers to the Right to Rise super PAC concede privately that the $40 million spent on positive ads aimed at telling Bush’s story has yielded no tangible dividends.
The report should have ended right there, or simply come to a completely different conclusion. If you are a frustrated Jeb supporter, the answer is staring you right in the face: when $40 million in positive media can’t move the needle in your candidate’s favor, perhaps the issue is not the Super PAC.
Otherwise, what is the argument? That Jeb, the son and brother of the past two GOP presidents, was inadequately packaged and sold to a primary electorate hungry for another Bush? That with better outside help he would have rocketed to the top of the polls? Color me skeptical.
Complaints of spendthrift habits also miss the mark — the latest grumbling centers around trollish billboards and miniature LCD screens loaded with a Jeb bio video. Are these moves gimmicky? Perhaps, but earned media more than justified the minimal expense. And when $40 million in feel-good advertising gets you nowhere, suddenly buzzworthy gimmicks look like the smarter play.
But it’s not just frustrated Jeb partisans heaping scorn on Murphy. He has become something of a maniacal supervillian to Rubio backers thanks to $20 million in negative advertising, and may soon be the scourge of the dozen Kasich supporters residing outside of Ohio or New Hampshire. To them I say: Mike Murphy is not your problem.
Now don’t get me wrong. I think the Reservoir Dogs scene unfolding in the Granite State right now is gratuitous, fratricidal, and ultimately futile. But Murphy and his team are pros, and they will play to the whistle. That means that as long as Jeb is in the race, they have a fiduciary duty to prosecute their campaign in such a way that it puts their candidate in the best position to win.
The problem of course, is that short of being the last man standing, Jeb cannot — and will not — be the nominee. But until he figures that out for himself, the R2R machine marches ever forward. Jeb’s path, such as it is, is to be the last man standing, and the only way to facilitate that is by snuffing out the competition, one by one.
So don’t blame Mike Murphy’s Super PAC strategy for Jeb’s troubles. Indulging this narrative merely insulates Jeb from the reality of this race and the consequences of his continued lurch toward electoral doom. Jeb needs to understand that the only person who can stop this train is him. He can’t fire Murphy — he can only fire himself.
If there’s anything to be critical about in hindsight, it’s the original, pre-firewall conception of Jeb’s campaign. The flawed conceit of his candidacy was that Bush Legacy × Wonkish Technocrat + $100 million = 2016 GOP nomination. Now that might have been a can’t-miss formula for success circa 2006, but a decade later it appeared shaky to anyone who looked closely.
So put away the pitchforks and let Murphy do his job. The Jeb train is going nowhere fast. $20 million later, Marco will be fine. As personal as friendly fire feels, if these hits didn’t come out in the primary, they would have been made in the general. The bigger issue is that this ongoing battle royale is wasting time that we as conservatives don’t have to stop Donald Trump. That is a problem — and only Jeb can fix it.
Published in General
I guess Mike Murphy is doing his job. Just not very well.
Without Murphy and his opposition research, how would we know that Marco’s boots have heels? How would we know that he withdrew money from a bank account? How would we know that he <gasp> violated a park curfew as a teenager? This desperate criminal almost became President, so we all owe Murphy a debt of gratitude.
Rubio fans can get in line. Murphy was a maniacal supervillain at Ricochet long before this race started.
Which should raise the question, “Is it really Jeb! keeping Rubio down? Or is it the case that the dogs don’t want Rubio’s chow either?
I’ll say it again: Rubio’s numbers have not gone down. They haven’t gone up much. But, the fact that, after this carpet bombing, Rubio is still standing says something about how ineffective Murphy is. Would his numbers have gone up, in the absence of Murphy’s idiotic campaign? Who knows? Beyond underscoring Murphy’s ineptitude, I assume that Marco’s ability to withstand Murphy’s onslaught also says something about the inherent strengths of his candidacy.
Everybody that I know in the Rubio camp is pretty relaxed these days. There’s a fairly clear path to the nomination for him, should things break his way in the next few weeks. But, his people also clearly recognize that things may not break their way.
What I really like about Marco’s crew is how perfectly sane, mature, and reasonable they seem to be– no histrionics; no apocalyptic sensibilities; no demonizing of opponents (other than Trump, who is, in fact, a demon); no magical ideation; no fantasies of inevitability; etc. They strike me as being an extremely healthy bunch of people.
What can’t we scorn both Jeb and Murphy in equal measure? Why does it have to be one or the other?
Heh. Someone has to defend the indefensible. I wonder how much it cost.
I am enjoying this show profoundly for one reason; the ‘consultants’ are being humiliated and hopefully will never be employed again. The visceral reaction that Murphy got here is a reflection not of his being right, but how far from any normal human reaction he acts and how utterly useless his ilk can be when running a campaign. Would you let IT run your business? No way. They can run some stuff that makes the business operate. Same with consultants.
Then again, Murphy is a wealthy man taking a percentage of the $100k he is wasting. So who is the fool?
My favorite part of the Jeb campaign is its flaming rebuke to the idea that you can make people vote for you if you spend enough money. A billion dollars wouldn’t have helped. What’s Trump spent – gas money for the jet and chair-rental for the halls?
Though there are certainly ways that he could, within the law, communicate this sentiment. The law’s got a few known loopzillas.
It is good to see the argument being made. I don’t agree, but I also don’t think that the author of this post is evil or corrupt for making the argument.
Murphy has said that he would love a two-man race Jeb! vs. Trump. I’m sure Cruze Vs. Jeb would also be desirable for the Jebsters too, so attack the threat in your lane, and the single biggest threat is Rubio.
Jeb said at CPAC after a mixed reception “that’s okay, I want to be your second choice” He said that.
Christie is a joke and will never go anywhere, so he’s no threat. Rubio will also be strong in Florida and a win there will kill Jeb’s chances completely.
I’m not counting Jeb out of this race quite yet. He needs only to outlast Rubio and he becomes the alternate establishment guy. Rove will propagandize on Fox that he’s the only one who can win and beat Hillary and he gets the nomination. But he will never win the general election.
Kudos to Liam Donovan on his first post here at Ricochet being “In Defense of Mike Murphy”!
Way to make a splash buddy. I hope you are up to the task of sparring with the likes of some of us. Or maybe you will be like other main feed contributors who drop stink bombs and run, we will find out shortly.
I sincerely doubt there are more than a handful of Ricochet readers who support Jeb Bush and are blaming Mike Murphy for the botched campaign so far. Way to come in in the middle of the conversation dude.
If you are defending Murphy as a vehicle to point out how the Jeb! campaign was doomed from the beginning, fine. We know that.
But there’s no need to defend Murphy. He’s a big boy and he chose to work for Jeb! and if he didn’t already know that it was doomed like a Greek Tragedy from the outset then he’s a complete moron in the political advisor department.
But I think he’s smarter than that. He chose the money and he doesn’t care what the result is. Perhaps he is like one of those traitors discussed by our other new contributor here
In Defense of Liam Donovan
So I would imagine kind of an open borders guy?
Yep. We all have our fiduciary duties don’t we?
Easy with the sleuthing. Why can’t we be nicer to people whose opinions we don’t share! It’s gotta be suspicions the man’s out on the make? It’s gotta be that if he mouths the wrong words, all the hearing he gets is, can he make enough rope to hang himself?
Bush Family Values.
I share a lot of agreement with Liam, especially about Jeb. I have been saying a lot of this from before the beginning, at the trial balloon phase. Look up some of my old posts.
But this is his first post and he a contributor with nary a bio on his page. Incidentally, ‘sleuthing’ is now simply googling what’s public. Interesting that the full bio wasn’t cut and pasted on the Ricochet site. Sadly, Sherlock Holmes’ services are no longer needed in this day.
So if he hadn’t done a cannonball into the swimming pool here I may not have noticed his morphology, but then, like Rubio’s faults they all come out eventually. When we are talking about the likes and duties of Mike Murphy, you shouldn’t expect anything but rough and tumble politics to be the mode of discourse.
I do follow your posts, when I’m not too scared of the coming conservative revolution. I of course disagree without reservation that if someone mounts a qualified defense of Mr. Murphy, he should expect Ricochet to give him him the bum rush. Making fun of him seems to me far preferable to suggesting or declaring that he’s a hack or worse. It never cease to surprise me that people who think they’re right mean by it that other people have to be punished. Somehow, knowledge turns into justice & all speeches turn into weapons! I guess the revolution is coming!
He deserves to be punished. He went to the same high school as Martin O’Malley.
Oh, wow. Nuke’em!
This was already shaky back in 2006: after Katrina and in the middle of W’s Surge dithering. It was insane after the 2008 financial crisis.
Wow, guys. Thanks for reading. And commenting. And googling, I guess.
Jon thought this piece might get an interesting response, and boy was he right.
I wrote this piece because it seems to me that the focus on Murphy and Right to Rise indulges the delusional of some that Jeb was ever poised to be the nominee. And, more perniciously, Jeb has been able to use Murphy as a lightnight rod to deflect accountability that belongs on him alone.
I get that the loathing towards the consultant class runs deep, and that Murphy is a cartoon version of this in the flesh. But my goal is to see Jeb out of the field, and to properly shame him you need to remove every fig leaf of blame and deflection. That was my goal here, and if it didn’t come through I’d ask that you read it again with that in mind.
As for my motivations, I am an open Rubio supporter. If you follow me (@lpdonovan) you already know this, but I do my best to be as cleared eyed about these things as possible. Jon ported my bio over from Medium, hence the brevity, but as you can see from the copy/paste job above I am an open book.
So thanks for your interest and I hope this discussion goes somewhere fruitful.
Cheers,
LPD
Jeb Bush has never had a chance in this race and his narcisistic candidacy has done n0thing but hurt the GOP and the country. Please go away.
You will get respect here for engaging. It’s frustrating when contributors post and run.
I don’t think writers want readers’ respect-
Thanks for reading the comments. In the event that you continue to post here and this isn’t just a one-off, I recommend better titling of your pieces.
Jeb Can’t Hide Behind Right to Rise: It’s Him!
or
Super Pac Can’t Get Traction: Could the Problem be… Jeb?
I’m sure Jon could have come up with a better one.
I can’t be the only one to have seen this coming. Jeb’s entry into the race tells us everything we need to know. He definitely is not listening to Liam or anyone else who has basic political instincts. So there’s something else happening and it may be fruitful to look dispassionately on what that might be. We also have to look very carefully at who says what, so forgive me for goggling. If you were to google me you would find I’m a musician by trade and not famous enough to enter the political fray without being better known for my political positions than my music, which would be bad.
I think Jeb stays in the race and blows everyone in his lane up. Murphy is the unleashed dog of war. But he was hired and unleashed by Jeb. Jeb should already be ashamed of himself. I don’t think more shaming – if he ever even hears or reads it – will help.
If a lasting result of Trump’s run is the evisceration of the consultant class, then that alone made it worth it.
If what I’ve read is correct, between Jeb! and Rubio, they’ve both cumulatively raised close to 250 million dollars thus far, and burned through a nice chunk of it. Trump, in the meantime, has reportedly spent a little less than 250 thousand. That’s about the same cost as one of the houses being built in the new slightly-upper middle class neighborhood development a few blocks away from me.
The title was meant to be provocative- and apparently that part worked, even if it steered people past the point of the piece. But to your point the subheader was “Right to Rise is not the problem- their candidate is.” It just didn’t make it into this iteration of the post.
As for getting Jeb out of the race, the only way it happens is if his patrons shun him- and they won’t do that so long as the focus is on Mike Murphy and the R2R red herring.
This is one thing I disagree with, the notion that one person being in the race causes another’s lack of support. Either people like you or they don’t. Either a candidate causes a spark in the voting public, or they don’t. So a candidate that complains he’s not getting anywhere because of the presence of another candidate is somewhat like a sports team complaining that the other team was better, and that’s not fair.
Bottom line: Jeb Bush is not why Marco Rubio isn’t taking off.
But you’ve put the focus on Mike Murphy with the title of your piece…then you take exception to those who take up the challenge and criticize Murphy for his slimy tactics. Your premise is that Murphy and R2R have a “fiduciary” duty to prosecute their campaign in such a way that it puts their candidate in the best position to win”. I think the general consensus is that Murphy’s prosecution is wrong-headed and focused on the wrong target and thus doing precisely the opposite of putting his candidate in the best position to win because it only casts Jeb as weak and ineffectual by not attacking the candidate who was a bigger threat (Trump) who was most adept in making Jeb look boring and like a wimp. Of course, Jeb himself was adept himself at bolstering those characterizations in his weak debate performances. Murphy’s thinking that once he is able to discredit and flitch off Rubio that his candidate would somehow emerge as a viable alternative to either Trump or Cruz isn’t working. Yet the ad spend continues. I understand the separation of PACs to candidates but had Murphy been my ad agency I would have fired him long ago for making my product look worse than it was.
They realized after $40M in positive ads that Jeb could only win a war of attrition. You can’t make his numbers go up, so you have to bring everyone else’s down. Rubio is the Jeb-alternative most likely to inherit his support and clinch a ticket into the final 3, so he must be destroyed. (And to a lesser degree, which I didn’t fully tease out, they need Trump to beat Cruz in Iowa.) I’m not defending that as a strategy, I’m merely acknowledging for what they manifestly believe it is- their best (only?) chance to win. Of course, it’s a self-destructive and myopic approach, but it’s hard to argue that there’s a path for Jeb short of being the last man standing. Which is why I repeated over and over that the answer is for Jeb to drop out, and soon, so that Trump can be defeated.