It has not been a good year for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Days after announcing he was running for president — way back on June 15, 2015 — NBC published a poll showing Bush as the frontrunner, five points ahead of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in a then-crowded 16-person GOP race.
Seven months later, Walker is long gone, and so is Bush’s lead. He pulled a measly under-3 percent support in the presidential race’s first big contest, Monday’s Iowa caucus. Even more embarrassing, The Washington Post reported that Bush spent a staggering $5,200 per vote in Iowa. By comparison, the Republican leaders Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio spent $700, $300 and $600, respectively.
There is an endless number of reasons why Jeb has fallen so hard since June. I tend to chalk it up to an insidious combination of his disastrous interview with FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly — you know, the one where he said he would’ve authorized the Iraq War in a do-over — along with mediocre debate performances overshadowed by petty onstage feuds with Trump.
Look, Cruz is gross, but he was smart in holding off on engaging Trump until just before the caucuses. Bush, on the other hand, has taken Trump head-on since the beginning of fall 2015, and has found himself the butt of some seriously immature and debilitating jokes.
Bush’s fall shouldn’t be taken lightly by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign for a couple different reasons. First, falling is what Clinton and Bush have in common. While Bush made the blunder of telling Kelly he’d have invaded Iraq in May 2015, Clinton, as a New York senator,voted in favor of authorizing military force in Iraq in 2002. Sanders didn’t. Neither did Lincoln Chafee, who criticized Clinton on the debate stage back in October 2015, by claiming that “there was no real evidence of weapons of mass destruction,” which was the rationale for invasion 14 years ago.
Second, both Bush and Clinton have personal ties to highly controversial past presidents. However, George W. Bush’s controversies surrounded committing war crimes, destroying the middle class, invading privacy, facilitating the crippling global economic crisis of 2008, etc., while Bill Clinton’s controversy was, well, a blow job.
Still, these connections point to one of the most important challenges facing the Clinton campaign moving forward: the trend in this presidential cycle of rejecting “the establishment politics.”
If you watched the post-caucus speeches, you heard Cruz and Sanders use this term a lot. It’s become a cornerstone of both of their campaigns, which makes sense considering they come from positions in their parties that are much farther right or left than your normal, run-of-the-mill candidates. Both emphasized their average campaign donations in their speeches, Cruz at $67 and Sanders at $23, throwing some serious shade to the super PACs that have propelled the Bush, Clinton and Rubio campaigns so far.
Now, to be clear, Cruz does have super PACs — Sanders is the only major candidate that doesn’t — but they’ve actually been criticized for how ineffective they are at advocating for Cruz. The reason super PACs are considered part of the establishment is because of their ability to circumvent traditional restrictions on campaign donations, thereby letting corporations donate as much as they want to a super PAC advocating a particular candidate. You can imagine how this can, and has, become corrupted.
Now, all this talk of campaign financing can become problematic. It becomes a game of choosing the candidate with the lowest donation average. Sanders fans just love to inundate the political conversation with campaign finance talk when there are much more important issues to discuss, such as the need for stronger foreign policy positions by Sanders, and again, how Hillary authorized use of military force in Iraq 14 years ago.
However, the issue of establishment politics, evidenced by Bush’s failures since June 2015, poses a real threat to the Clinton campaign. I mean, just think: how is a 74-year-old man in his 25th year in Congress able to so effectively paint himself as the new face of progressivism in America?
