The last timꦯe Jeb Bush ꦰran for office was 13 years ago.
Barack Obama was 💛serving in the Illinois state Senate.
No onꦦe had heard of ObamaCare or the Tea Party, and wouldn’t for years.
It was before the invasion of Iraq, before 💙Hurricane Katrina, before the financial meltdown. We had just invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq.
It was a political epoch ago.
If timing is everything in politics, Busꦉh has, among other things, a timing prob൲lem.
He had an exemplary record as a conservative reformer in Florida almost a decade ago, but the achievements and fights of the other Republican governors running for president have been the stuff of contemporar🌱y headlines.
He’s a gifted politician, but his father and brother preceded him to the presidency, giving his campaign an inevitable dynastic air as the vehicle of🐽 “the third Bush.”
The phrase “shock and awe,” associated with the Bush ca♌mpaign at its inception, is now exclusively used to discuss the gap between its expectations and performance.
The fundraising, even if it falls short of the widely cited $100 million mark, has been prodigious.
But there’s been a stark enthusiasm gap between donors and actual🍒 voters — even if Bush pulled off a polished campaign laun🌠ch on Monday in Miami, replete with crowds chanting “Let’s go Jeb!”
If the Republican nomination were going to be fought out exclusively in fundraisers held in corporate conference rooms and fancy homes, Bush would be win꧟ning in a rout.
Instead, he🧸 is clustered with a few other top contenders, a front🃏-runner in name only.
His freshly unveiled “Jeb!🔴” logo might be more appropriately punctuated with a question mark, as a nod to doubts about whether he can excite Republican voters in 😼a field that is as large and talented as any group of presidential aspirants in memory.
The Mitt Romneꦰy path to the nomination is not a𝔍vailable to him this year.
Bush can’t show up with a fundraising advantage, a professional operation and a resume, and then expect to inexorably grind down al♈l the other candidates.
Romney could do that in 2012 against anꦉ unprepared Rick Perry, an undisciplined Newt Gin♎grich and an unfunded Rick Santorum. Bush is running against a field that has about a half-dozen candidates who would have been in the top tier last time around.
Romney won the nomination despite his Massachusetts health care plan that was anathema to much of tꦡhe party.
It’s one thing to have a few heterodoxie🦋s, though; it’s another to be defined by them.
What most conservatives heard from Bush during the Obama years were his plaints about the GOP’s tone, and his support for comprehensive immigrat🥂ion reform and Common Core.
Those two issues have come up over and over again during the early phase of the campaign, and while Bush has adjusted his positions a little bit, he hasn’t ▨changed them.
When he said at the outset of his run that he’d be willing to lose the primary to win the general, it seemed a poetic (🌞not to m꧅ention nonsensical) exaggeration, but occasionally it’s appeared to be his actual plan.
He can come off as a scold.
When he says how optimistic and inclusive 🅷he will be, it sounds like he thinks most everyone else in the GOP is pessimistic and exclusionary. The party won’t naturally warm to someone 🐟who seems to think it has to be saved from itself.
And there will, of cours🌄e, be no winning the general without winning the primary.
Bush gave a spirited announcement speech to a boisterous crowd in Miami, the best public moment o𓆉f his campaign so far. The party will need to know he’s a fighter, and chiefly of the left and the media, not his own side.
It will need to know that he has an agenda new and different fro💦m his brother, and much broader and more conservative than his famo🌟us stances on immigration and Common Core.
Bush is a genuinely 🐽accomplished executive 🌄and a creative policy wonk, with a natural sense of authority.
He’s ⛎a talented man, in the political fight of his life.
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