Jeb Bush: A Campaign Obituary

Bush speaks to supporters after the South Carolina vote. (Mark Makela/Getty)

As the sun came up over South Beach on June 15, 2015, it was good to be Jeb Bush.

Florida’s former two-term governor had certainly endured turbulence in the six months since a low-grade Facebook video announced that he would explore a run for the presidency. And the fundamentals of Bush’s candidacy were plainly suspect, starting with his last name, which was disproportionately responsible for the negative feelings registered in poll after poll at every stage of the campaign. Moreover, he was perceived as a moderate on issues of visceral import to the party’s base, and his campaign skills had rusted visibly after 13 years away from the trail.

But as he arrived in Miami to launch his campaign on that summer day, the governor had reason for optimism. Cash had come in at a torrid pace. He had hired a top team of strategists and consultants. His résumé was impressive by any objective metric. He was as well positioned as anyone to pursue the Republican nomination.

He began the journey at home, in his element, surrounded by the kind of demographically diverse crowd that Republican leaders were desperate to attract nationwide. From these friendly confines Bush was determined to reshape the perception voters held of him, and to reframe the Republican race as a contest of vision and ideas that would be won by someone with a proven record of accomplishment and inclusion. Switching unexpectedly to Spanish, Bush urged onlookers to “join our cause of opportunity for everyone” as the audience cheered.

He was at ease, effortlessly outlining a reform-driven policy agenda aimed at restoring social mobility for the masses. And he made a point of dismissing notions of a dynastic coronation, even as the Bush name and network were already powering his vaunted electoral steamroller. “Not a one of us deserves the job by right of résumé, party, seniority, family, or family narrative,” Bush said that day. “It’s nobody’s turn, it’s everybody’s test, and it’s wide open — exactly as a contest for president should be.”

The next day, “wide open” took on a whole new meaning. As Bush basked in the afterglow of his triumphant launch, Donald Trump descended down an escalator 1,300 miles away in Manhattan to the blaring background noise of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star, having toyed for decades with the idea of a White House bid, was finally making good. He offered a message that could not have been more different from Bush’s, and delivered a remark that instantly reframed the Republican campaign: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Bush couldn’t have known it then, but this was the beginning of the end. Trump’s announcement transformed the electoral landscape overnight, turning the campaign into a contest of personality over policy, rhetoric over results. It culminated in South Carolina on Saturday night when Bush, having failed a third time to secure a top-three finish, abruptly suspended his campaign and wished good luck to those competitors “remaining on the island.”

Trump’s candidacy cast a shadow over the Republican campaign that Bush was never able to escape.

Trump’s candidacy cast a shadow over the Republican campaign that Bush was never able to escape. At his Miami headquarters that day, Bush’s top aides dismissed the Trump sideshow, thinking if anything it would help them in their efforts to cast Bush as the lone adult in the room. But Trump’s comment about Mexican “rapists” was just the first in a string of provocations that steered the Republican primary away from the high-minded, policy-oriented affair Bush had envisioned.

This wasn’t the primary campaign Bush had signed up for — one in which he hoped candidates would engage one another intellectually and eschew what he called “food fights.” Instead, he would fail time and again to shift the debate to friendlier terrain, struggling mightily just to avoid being swallowed by the controversies of the moment.

Trump refocused the public’s attention on the issues of free trade and illegal immigration while channeling the public’s anger with the political establishment and Washington’s ruling class. This proved helpful to some candidates, such as Ted Cruz and for a time Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. But it was devastating to Bush.

In late August, Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe summarized Bush’s woes thusly: “Without Trump in the race, we’d be having a nice debate over tax policy right now,” he said. “Instead we’re talking about ‘anchor babies.’”

* * *

Trump was not the only unforeseen obstacle in Bush’s path.

By being the first to announce an exploratory effort, all the way back in December 2014, Bush hoped to preemptively eliminate competition for the center-right voters and donors he would need to win the nomination. It was effective in forcing the hand of Mitt Romney, who did not have the luxury of time to consider the viability of a third campaign, and ultimately passed when it became apparent that Bush was pilfering much of his financial network.

The early projection of a fundraising juggernaut — “shock and awe,” as Bush’s team took to calling it — was designed to clear the field of other threats as well, including Marco Rubio. Bush knew the young senator, his one-time political protégé, harbored national ambitions of his own. But he was convinced, as were mutual allies of both men, that getting in first would deprive Rubio of the oxygen needed to run a competitive campaign. Nobody wanted to see Rubio’s future prospects damaged; Bush loyalists felt confident that Rubio defer to the governor and wait his turn. “I would hope they would sit down and reason together,” Paul Senft, Bush’s friend and Florida’s former Republican national committeeman, said at the time.

Rubio, who’d been in a hurry from the moment he entered political life, was in no mood to wait. On April 13, 2015, mere miles from Bush’s home in Coral Gables, Rubio took to Miami’s historic Freedom Tower and announced his presidential run. “We Americans are proud of our history, but our country has always been about the future,” he said. “Before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. We can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past.”

The GOP had shifted rightward in the aftermath of George W.’s presidency, when Jeb himself was out of office and detached from the ideological palpitations of the base.

That barb was ostensibly aimed at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, but it was also an obvious nod to the central vulnerability of Bush’s candidacy. Republican voters, weary of George W. Bush by the end of his presidency and underwhelmed by their options in 2008 and 2012, were indeed seeking something new in 2016. Rubio knew Bush meant to keep talk of kin — especially his brother — to a minimum. And the young Floridian would never explicitly attack the Bush family legacy. But he did the next best thing, keeping Bush on the defensive with a dog-whistle message of generational contrast, forward-looking leadership, and humble origins.

Jeb Bush told anyone who would listen that he was his own man, but complicated that message early in his campaign when he previewed his first major speech on foreign policy by unveiling a list of advisers that included dozens of foreign-policy aides who had served his father and his brother. The list had little ideological coherence; it included everybody from James Baker to Dick Cheney aide John Hannah, and from Paul Wolfowitz to Robert Zoellick. And he appeared to have little control over some of these so-called advisers: He could do nothing to stop Baker from delivering remarks to the dovish pro-Israel group J Street, which riled many conservatives and which the Bush campaign was forced openly to condemn.

Bush fatigue aside, the GOP had shifted rightward in the aftermath of George W.’s presidency, when Jeb himself was out of office and detached from the ideological palpitations of the base. Rubio, ideologically pragmatic at his core, had risen with the tea-party movement and was comfortable riding the electorate’s rightward waves. Bush was not: He stubbornly clung to unpopular positions on Common Core and immigration reform, and when he was criticized, famously responded by saying a Republican must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general.”

It made sense to the old Republican guard, even as it rendered Bush obviously out-of-step with the modern party. ”My view is that Jeb is the best qualified, he’s been tested, he dealt with eight hurricanes and tropical storms in 16 months in Florida, he has a very good record as governor, he made over 8,000 appointments and nearly half for women, not just secretarial but in prominent jobs,” Bob Dole, the 1996 GOP nominee, said in an interview this week, capturing the bewilderment of the Bush-family network. “I don’t know. I just wish people would listen.”

* * *

Even if people were willing to listen to Bush at the race’s outset, it’s not clear that they liked what they heard. The exploratory phase of the campaign was clumsy and tone-deaf, and though staffing was an issue, most insiders pointed the finger at Bush, who most memorably staggered through a four-day stretch without a coherent answer to the question of whether, knowing what we know now, he would have supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

At the same time, Bush’s campaign-in-waiting, stocked with loyalists and led by long-time adviser Sally Bradshaw and the laid-back Iowa operative David Kochel, had adopted a genteel approach that was largely in keeping with the candidate’s character. Yet the more Bush stumbled and the less imposing his operation appeared, staffers sensed change was imminent at the top. It came a week before the launch, when Bush decided to appoint Danny Diaz, a hard-charging D.C. consultant, as campaign manager, and shift Kochel, who’d initially been hired for that role, into the position of chief strategist.

RELATED: Jeb’s Graceless Decline

Despite its foreboding implications, the pre-campaign shakeup did nothing to alter the conventional wisdom that it was Bush’s race to lose. In the summer months surrounding his launch, Bush consistently polled at or near the top of the pack. He continued to bring in buckets of money. His team organized in every voting jurisdiction, certain that a muscular, national field operation would compensate for the candidate’s basic weaknesses. As the field gathered in Cleveland on August 6 for the first debate, Bush’s team was as bullish as ever.

Bush’s allies assured skeptics that he was merely shaking off the rust, working his way into shape after a long period of political inactivity.

The candidate, however, struggled to keep his cool. In the minutes before he and his rivals were ushered onto the stage at Quicken Loans Arena, Bush was sweating profusely. So much so, in fact, that Ben Carson, the physician, asked him if he was okay, only to be met with a testy response. It was a sign of things to come. Bush, his 6-foot-4 frame hunched over the podium, spent the debate stammering painfully over wonkish talking points. His allies assured skeptics that he was merely shaking off the rust, working his way into shape after a long period of political inactivity. But a month later at the Reagan Library in California, it became apparent that the problem wasn’t going away. With Trump stealing the show and Rubio delivering polished soliloquies, Bush once again looked lost.

He knew he needed to reassert himself with a commanding moment. In the weeks leading up to the third debate in Colorado, he and his team settled on a target. Seizing on an issue that was increasingly in the news, Bush rehearsed ad nauseam an assault on Rubio’s absentee voting record in the Senate. But there was no element of surprise; Rubio, reporters, and rival campaigns all knew the attack was coming. And when Bush feebly flung his rebuke at Rubio — “you should be showing up to work” — the senator came back so forcefully that Bush appeared unable to respond. It was the exchange that launched a thousand headlines about the apprentice besting the master, advancing a narrative that maybe, just maybe, Bush wasn’t cut out for this campaign business.

Voters had taken notice. While Bush had polled in the mid teens nationally throughout much of the summer and into the early fall, his numbers declined sharply in late September and early October. By the time of the Colorado debate on October 28, he had sunk to the single digits, where he would spend the remainder of his campaign.

Suddenly frantic, his donors, friends, and allies exchanged flurries of doomsday e-mails in the aftermath of the Colorado disaster. With another debate just around the corner in Wisconsin, they worried about his capacity to right the ship. The candidate, sensing that his allies were losing confidence, reluctantly hired famed Fox News media coach Jon Kraushar to help him refine his presentation. And in the run-up to the Wisconsin debate, he dutifully conceded to one audience after another that “I have to get better.”

But Bush’s closest allies were beginning to accept the reality that he simply wouldn’t. “Debates do not play to his strength,” Jim Towey, the president of Ave Maria University in Florida and one of Bush’s closest personal friends, said on the eve of the Wisconsin debate. “But I think he’s going to be just fine — he’ll benefit from the expectations not being that high.”

* * *

Gaming expectations was never Bush’s strong suit. He repeatedly set the bar too high. During his first, highly anticipated visit to Iowa in March 2015, Bush told Radio Iowa that he would be “all in” to win the state, much to the chagrin of his aides, including Kochel, who had run Romney’s Iowa campaign and knew Bush’s support for Common Core and comprehensive immigration reform could render him unpalatable to much of the state’s conservative electorate. Bush officials spent the next nine months slowly backpedaling, their spin evolving as they went. First, they said Bush needed only a top-3 or top-4 finish; then, they said he merely had to best Chris Christie and John Kasich; finally, they declared Iowa immaterial altogether.

It was clear by the fall that Bush’s flag would be planted in New Hampshire. His brain trust had redirected the campaign’s resources from Miami to Manchester, and the team dumped resources into a ground game there that led all opponents in voter-contact metrics. Yet even as New Hampshire became make-or-break for Bush , his team saw Trump building an insurmountable lead in the Granite State. Still worse, Bush’s rivals in the so-called establishment lane polled evenly with him there despite being massively outspent. (Bush’s campaign and super PAC combined to spend nearly $40 million on TV ads in New Hampshire.) This prompted discussions in late December of playing their wild card, and, in doing so, preparing to die on a different hill: South Carolina.

That state had been good to the Bushes, especially George W., who remained immensely popular there in the wake of his turbulent presidency. Jeb, who had been so reluctant in the early going to reference his family ties, had grown steadily more comfortable citing their examples of public service and political decency. With certain crowds, such as World War II veterans in New Hampshire, Bush would build his remarks around his father’s biography. His brother represented a different challenge, but Jeb and his campaign felt certain if there was one place 43 could help them, it was South Carolina.

Diaz and company had quietly built out an impressive operation there, which grew even stronger with Lindsey Graham’s mid-January endorsement. Increasingly certain that he would not be able to break through in either Iowa or New Hampshire, and optimistic that the field would winnow heading into South Carolina, Bush’s team agreed to leave everything on the field in the Palmetto State.

Jeb and his campaign felt certain if there was one place 43 could help them, it was South Carolina.

Unexpectedly, Bush arrived there with the wind at his back thanks to Rubio’s disastrous fifth-place finish in New Hampshire. It was in that state that Bush had finally hit his stride, campaigning down the home stretch with the command and assertiveness that had eluded him for much of the past year. On primary night, huddled in a war room at the Radisson in downtown Manchester, senior Bush officials prayed for one thing — a finish ahead of Rubio. When they got it, a year’s worth of pent-up anxiety was uncorked as they felt an authentic mandate to carry on. “Bush is back because of New Hampshire!” Graham declared from the stage at the campaign’s official watch party. “South Carolina, here we come!” Bush himself appeared to buy in. “It looks like you all have reset the race!” he told cheering supporters.

Bush’s brain trust was not buying in, however. His top aides knew they needed something major to sustain and enhance whatever smidgen of momentum they’d gained heading into South Carolina. They needed Nikki Haley. The popular governor was rumored to be interested in endorsing, and she knew Bush better than anyone else in the field. Their relationship dated back to October 2010, when Haley, stumped by the sudden realization that she was going to be elected, called him and asked for advice. Bush dispatched Bradshaw to Columbia to assist with her transition, and later lent his expertise when Haley embarked on an education-reform package. The two teams remained close. “She really, really likes Jeb,” says Tim Pearson, a top Haley adviser. “Their relationship goes back years.”

But Haley, who had decided not to make an endorsement until after New Hampshire, was genuinely undecided. She ultimately chose to host dinners with three candidates — Cruz, Bush, and Rubio. She dined with Bush on Thursday evening, February 11, just 48 hours removed from his New Hampshire bounce. Two nights later, on Saturday, he turned in easily his best debate performance of the campaign. For the first time in months Bush’s team felt the wind at their backs. And they felt confident Haley would either endorse Bush or no one at all; Cruz was too polarizing for her taste, they figured, and Rubio’s top aides had worked against her in the nasty 2010 gubernatorial race.

The following Tuesday, on a sunny afternoon in Summerville, South Carolina, Bush got word that Haley would he endorsing Rubio just as he arrived at a country club for an outdoor town-hall meeting,. He could not hide his disgust. Taking the stage a few minutes later, he lashed out at Rubio for questioning his foreign-policy experience. “It’s hard for me to be lectured by a gifted young guy who thinks going to a committee hearing means you think you know something about the world,” Bush said, shaking his head.

The entire event was off-kilter. It began with Bush snapping at an audience member who urged him to speak up because his microphone wasn’t working, and ended with multiple attendees standing to offer unsolicited advice on how Bush could better execute his campaign and respond to Trump’s “bullying.” In between, a visibly flustered Bush wondered aloud with only a hint of sarcasm if it was time to give up. “It’s all been decided, apparently,” Bush told the audience. “The pundits have already figured it out. We don’t have to go vote. I should stop campaigning, maybe.”

The events of that day brought Bush to grips with the reality of his campaign’s demise, while highlighting the very dynamics that precipitated it. Bush found himself, once more, fighting a two-front war against unanticipated foes whose threat he never fully understood — Trump with his celebrity-fueled suffocation of the GOP’s intellectual struggle, and Rubio with his fashionable, attractive substitution of rhetoric for record. Bush could not believe audience members were standing to question him about Trump’s antics any more than he could believe Haley would endorse a 44-year-old, first-term senator whose surrogate, Rick Santorum, could not name a single one of his major accomplishments.

* * *

Why had personality trumped policy? Why had eloquence prevailed over experience? Why wasn’t Jeb Bush the answer to the questions voters were asking?

“He was a great, great, great governor. A conservative. But you know, the people I talk to, there’s just not any excitement there,” Glenn McCall, South Carolina’s national committeeman, said. “They’re looking for that next generation of Republicans out there. They’re looking for something different.”

McCall paused, and added: “I hate it for him, but I think folks just want to move on.”

‘They’re looking for that next generation of Republicans out there. They’re looking for something different.’

— Glenn McCall

The brother and son of the two most recent Republican presidents, Bush had sworn up and down from day one that he was his “own man.” But few had believed him. And even if they had, his accompanying deficiencies were too deep-seated to overcome. Bush wasn’t merely the past when Republicans wanted the future; he was diplomatic when they wanted combative, moderate when they wanted conservative, and royalty when they wanted revolution.

This presented a perfect storm, one that only a perfect candidate could have survived. And Bush was far from a perfect candidate. It’s a strange and Shakespearian twist that Bush, groomed from the beginning to carry his father’s legacy, was unable to win the White House in large part because of the brother’s. A Republican party that is unrecognizable to the Bush clan owes much of its modern identity to the backlash against George W. — and against the powerful symbolism of a potential third Bush presidency.

It might happen yet; George P. Bush, Jeb’s eldest son, is Texas land commissioner, viewed as a rising political star in his own right. He’s still just 39; it’s possible that one day he’ll take his own shot at the presidency, and in an age when the family name is not an albatross around his neck.

But if Saturday indeed marks the death of a political dynasty, Jeb Bush, for his many manifest flaws as a presidential candidate, does not deserve solitary blame in the autopsy.

Eliana Johnson contributed to the reporting of this story.

— Tim Alberta is the chief political correspondent for National Review.