Marco Rubio killed his candidacy last night, and it’s now only a matter of time before Bush drops out, although he never had much of a chance to begin with.
Like most Republicans, Jeb Bush isn’t a fan of democracy, and his campaign strategy reflects it:
“Were America’s presidential elections more democratic, Jeb would never have been a serious candidate to begin with. From the beginning, the strategy behind his candidacy had little to do with actual voters. As Politico reported, it was to leverage his father and brother’s fundraising network to get donors to ‘write the biggest checks you can and create a massive pile of cash to scare away other candidates.’ In January, Jeb launched his campaign by creating a Super PAC designed to raise unlimited amounts of money from the super rich. For seven months, he maintained this ‘laser focus’ on money, holding fundraisers that reached $100,000 per person. All the while, he lied to journalists, telling them he hadn’t decided whether to run because admitting the truth would have made it illegal for him to solicit these vast sums. It seemed to work. When Mitt Romney decided not to run, perhaps in part because Jeb had stolen so many of his donors, the Washington Post declared that ‘Jeb Bush has become the GOP front-runner.'”
Trouble is, the voters didn’t cooperate:
“A Bloomberg poll in April found that 42 percent of potential Republican primary voters said they would never vote for Jeb while only 14 percent said they would seriously consider him.”
Worse, he’s an inept campaigner:
“In May, Jeb said he would have invaded Iraq even knowing the country had no weapons of mass destruction, a position even most conservatives consider absurd. Then, asked to clarify his view on the war, he gave four different answers in four days, thus compounding his initial mistake.
“In July he said, ‘people need to work longer hours.’ Later that month he announced, ‘We need to figure out a way to phase out’ Medicare ‘and move to a new system.’
“In August, he told a South Carolina audience that, ‘I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars in funding for women’s health programs.’ And then, speaking the day after a fatal shooting at a community college in Oregon, he said, ‘Look, stuff happens.’
Does that sound like someone you want leading our country? Me neither. And, apparently not very many Republicans either, although their motivations may differ from yours or mine.
“By then, national polls showed Jeb at 4 percent, half the level enjoyed by Carly Fiorina.”
That doesn’t look like a winner by any stretch. Read the story here.
Update: Nearly all the postmortems I’ve read agree the big story of last night’s debate is that Rubio virtually destroyed Bush’s campaign. This article explains why in a lucid way.
