If there isn’t one already, there will soon be a Hitler video about the Jeb! campaign. There is definitely a bunker mentality as Mr. Inevitable Dynasty has become Mr. Stuck-in-Single-Digits-While-Donald-Trump-Drinks-His-Milkshake. Recently, the Jeb! camp met with its megadonors (i.e. “Jeb’s Base”) to convince them to keep writing checks because despite Jeb’s low and sinking poll numbers, eventual victory was inevitable. Out of that meeting leaked this slide:
Jeb Bush’s campaign may be mortally wounded. Limping in the polls despite his massive war chest, he stooped (almost literally if you check the body language) to attacking Marco Rubio in an attempt to revive his fortunes.
Rubio’s response, suggesting that Bush had been “told” to attack him, seemed like a bull’s-eye. Jeb Bush is an honorable man; a man raised to behave like a gentleman; but he was feeling desperate at Wednesday’s debate, and tried to play against type. It failed utterly. Rubio was ready, and parried Bush’s thrust by highlighting — for Bush and the audience — how very unbecoming the attack was. He made Bush look small, and you could almost tell that Bush himself felt diminished for doing it. This was not the “joyful” race he had envisioned.
Is it really so shocking that Republican primary voters have turned their faces away from Jeb Bush? Though he was an outstanding governor of Florida, his election would represent something unprecedented in American politics – a third president from one family. It bespeaks a wholesome anti-dynastic spirit in the electorate to say, “No, two is the limit.” Those were certainly my sentiments. Nor did his donor base guarantee anything. Who was the best-financed Republican candidate in 1980? Not Reagan. Not even G.H.W. Bush. It was John Connally. He got exactly one delegate.
There’s a stinging jab at Rubio at the end of this emotional report. (The video is at the link; no embedding option, unfortunately.) We’ve heard these stories before about quality workers being fired and forced to train their replacements but the Disney angle on this one seems to expand the outrage from many different directions.
Is this where Jeb steps in to differentiate himself?
I really have nothing to add to this, from the Washington Post:
Jeb Bush is having a “meeting” this weekend — and CBS reports it in terms seeming to imply he may consider withdrawing from the race. He should.
Bush still has a far greater chance at his party’s nomination than most ambitious politicians can ever dream of. His fundraising may not reach expectations, but he can surely draw enough to drag this campaign out if he choses. Unlike Scott Walker or Rand Paul (who needs to save his Senate seat), he has no day job to think about. Nothing is making him quit.
But it would be far better for the party and the country if he withdrew.
Jeb Bush hunkers down with family to assess his candidacy
By MAJOR GARRETT CBS NEWS October 23, 2015, 6:03 PM
Jeb Bush will attend a finance meeting this weekend in Houston convened by former President George H. W. Bush and attended by Bush’s brother, former President George W. Bush, CBS News has learned.
Sorry, Jeb Bush, talking about your favorite Marvel superheroes does not count as making yourself a “DC outsider.”
So Jeb Bush was asked on the campaign trail about returning to the gold standard. His answer: “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know for sure.” I think the WaPo’s Matt O’Brien is right that the following would have been the far better replay:
This was not the right answer. The right answer would have been that the gold standard was a “barbarous relic” even 80 years ago, and might be the world’s worst idea today.
The Tax Foundation analysis of Bobby Jindal’s tax plan:
- Governor Jindal’s tax plan would substantially lower individual income taxes, eliminate the corporate income tax, and repeal a number of complex features in the current tax code.
- Governor Jindal’s plan would cut taxes by $11.3 trillion over the next decade on a static basis. However, the plan would end up reducing tax revenues by $9 trillion over the next decade when accounting for economic growth from increases in the supply of labor and capital.
So let’s summarize the four plans examined by the Tax Foundation model:
One important caveat (other than the vagaries of dynamic scoring) is that the TF model does not factor the “fiscal costs of higher interest payments, as well as the macroeconomic effects of the spending reductions needed to bring the budget into balance.” Let me also add that one other thing the TF model shows is that personal income tax cuts tend to have the biggest revenue loss and the least GDP bang for the trillion bucks.
Defending Jeb Bush is detrimental enough to a person’s reputation, but I’m going to risk it all defending the latest caricaturized version of Jeb. “Stuff happens” is politically incorrect in the strictest sense: It’s the incorrect sentiment to express if you want to advance politically. But the world of politics is not known for its concern with facts, and “stuff happens” is appropriate and accurate. (Note: I’ll continue to use Jeb’s wording, though I prefer the more common, earthy variant.)
In regular conversation, “stuff happens” can be a flip response to terrible events or an excuse for inaction, but coming from the government, it’s just the right response (provided the terrible events aren’t the government’s fault). In the government’s case, I support finding as many excuses for inaction as possible. “Stuff happens” happens to be a good one, as it’s a pithy form of the conservative belief that humanity is sinful and the libertarian belief that central planners and bureaucrats won’t change it from being so.
Sometimes, no matter how you market something, it’s uncomfortably obvious that you’ve made a hotdog out of fish meat. Is Jeb! Finished?
Jeb Bush is back in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages this morning, explaining “How I’ll Slash the Regulation Tax.” Similar to his tax plan, there’s both rhetoric here to warm a conservative’s heart — whatever that means — and details that demonstrate how Bush simply doesn’t get the the expectations of the right wing of what should be his base (disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of the far right wing of what should be his base).
This won’t be another debate recap post. An army of pundits (Please note: Worst. Army. Ever.) has already dissected last night’s proceedings and the emerging consensus seems about right to me: Carly Fiorina dominated, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie both had some pretty good moments, and Donald Trump’s pilot light kept shutting off. Everyone else was basically treading water. In the undercard debate, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham both looked serviceable, but c’mon — it’s not that big of a deal to win the NIT.
So let’s play the story forward: after last night, what dynamics play out over the six weeks until the next GOP debate takes place in Boulder, Colorado? (Seriously, RNC? Boulder? Was George Soros’ penthouse booked that night?) Here are some of the trends I’ll be watching for:
Carly in the Crosshairs
I am an admirer of Jeb Bush. He was a first-rate governor in Florida. Unlike Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio, he would not have to learn all that much on the job. He has executive experience. He has dealt with emergencies. He knows where the buck stops, and I am confident that he would handle foreign policy well.
This is no small matter. Foreign-policy competence is the sine qua non for everything else. Defending the national interest is the main reason we have a federal government. Paul, Cruz, Rubio — none of them has ever run anything larger than a medical practice. They would make freshman mistakes, and you and I would pay dearly for their blunders.
That having been said, I am wary of Jeb. He is too close to the Chamber of Commerce. He is too sympathetic to illegal immigrants. I would not trust him to put an end to the mass influx into the United States from abroad, and I do not like his stance on Common Core. He is a big-government Republican who is perfectly happy to encroach on state and local prerogatives. There is no way that he would cut back on the administrative state. With the right folks running the show, he would think, all will go well.
In his weekly column in the Wall Street Journal, Bill McGurn neatly sums up Jeb Bush’s problem:
Mr. Bush is like the father of the bride dealing with a belligerent drunk who’s crashed the wedding reception. At every juncture, the drunk is willing to escalate insults. Because he’s long beyond shame, moreover, he doesn’t mind an incident, and might even want one.
Long past shame. That’s The Donald, all right.
Jeb Bush will not be offering American voters a fantasy tax plan. Unfortunately, this is a detail too often worth noting when examining Republican tax ideas. Bush’s economic blueprint, announced this week, doesn’t replace the current income tax with a flat tax, a national sales tax, or some other tax based on a close reading of the biblical Book of Deuteronomy.
Rather, if you assembled a random group of smart, GOP-leaning economists and told them to cook up a plan to boost long-term economic growth, their recipe would likely resemble Bush’s “Reform and Growth Act of 2017.” Which is why the Bush plan kind of also looks like the Mitt Romney plan from 2012. Like Romney, Bush would reduce the top tax rate to 28 percent while also reducing corporate and investment tax rates. The theory here is that more investment would increase productivity and economic growth. One of the especially disappointing features of the current recovery has been the lack of business spending and weak productivity gains — at least as officially measured.
The Bush plan has a populist streak, though. The focus isn’t solely on heroic entrepreneurs and multinational firms locked in cutthroat global competition. Bush would double the standard deduction taken by most of us, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for childless workers, move some 15 million low-income Americans off the income tax rolls, and close the “carried interest” tax break for hedge-fund managers. Hey, 47 percent, he cares! To be fair, most politically successful Republican tax plans contain a mix of changes to improve economic incentives while providing direct tax relief for the broad middle class. That was the Reagan model, the Bush II model, and now apparently the Bush III model, too.
(A multi-millionaire donor enters Right to Rise headquarters.)
