Today Lindsey Graham ended his quixotic presidential campaign. With not much money, zero ratings in the polls, and the prospect of being humiliated in his native South Carolina, he bowed to the inevitable. Graham will be missed for his wit, his common sense on foreign and defense policy, as well as for being consistently the best performer in the “happy hour debates” (his term) to which he had been consigned. But right now a lot of Republicans who worry about the direction of their party wish that some other candidates that haven’t much more of a chance of becoming president than Graham were able to back away too. Of course, I’m speaking of Jeb Bush.
A year ago Bush was the clear frontrunner in the race whose historic fundraising blitz convinced Mitt Romney that a third run for the White House was impossible. Since then, he has become better known for being Donald Trump’s straight man. He has struggled in vain to shake Trump’s unfair taunts about him being “low energy,” but the exchanges between the two are an unfortunate experiment in human psychology that explains why sometimes bullies win.
We got a taste of that this past weekend when Bush made headlines for saying that he thought Trump was “a jerk.” He laughed and said that returning the insult was “therapy.” Like his slightly better efforts at responding to Trump in last week’s debate, the barb earned him some publicity and encouraged his dwindling band of supporters and donors that he wasn’t rolling over for the real estate mogul. Indeed, those spinning for Bush are now claiming that his willingness to utter a pointless jab aimed at Trump is evidence that he still has a chance to win the GOP nomination.
Nonsense.
Bush still has a super PAC with huge campaign war chest, and they are flooding the airwaves in New Hampshire and on cable news channels that Republicans watch promoting his candidacy. Indeed, despite Trump’s cracks about his energy, he has campaigned hard in New Hampshire and his ads there are ubiquitous. And, yes, there are six weeks of campaigning left before the first voting starts, and that theoretically gives anyone a chance.
Let’s also state again that in spite of all the abuse he’s suffered in the last 12 months, Bush is a good man with a strong record as a thoughtful conservative governor of Florida and the gravitas that comes from being a member of a family that prizes public service. His positions on the issues are reasonable, and he’s a plausible candidate for the presidency. But it is no more “his time” to be president than it was for Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, or Scott Walker. The country doesn’t want a third President Bush, and Republicans know Jeb’s chances of beating Hillary Clinton are as poor or worse than those of Trump.
Even if he won’t face facts, it’s important that other Republicans be willing to do so. After a year of campaigning and the expenditure of vast sums, Bush is still languishing at less than 5 percent in the Real Clear Politics of national polls of Republican voters. He trails Trump by a humiliating 30 percentage points and also trails Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio by embarrassingly large margins. In New Hampshire, where he still harbors hopes of an upset, he is doing a bit better with an RCP average of 8 percent but still trails Rubio and Chris Christie as well as Trump and Cruz, who are also in the top two spots there. That leaves him both room and time for a comeback in the Granite State especially given the resources at his disposal that the candidates who have already dropped out lacked.
But if the only way he can get any real attention is to insult Trump, he’s in big trouble. Everyone already knew Trump was a jerk but his willingness to speak without a filter or even without any serious thought is what a lot of voters like. But that is no victory for Jeb because it just gives Trump more opportunities to beat up Bush. For a man whose candidacy is based on his seriousness, that’s a disaster. Nobody thinks Bush is a tough guy for calling Trump a name. And the fact that he says doing so is therapeutic merely confirms his status as Trump’s victim, not his equal or the better man.
Instead of expressing satisfaction about this exchange, Bush’s supporters should understand that it is actually confirmation that he is heading for a historic disaster in terms of the ratio between funds expended to convention delegates won.
The only thing Jeb’s therapy session is doing is prolonging his agony and making it harder for either of the other relatively moderate candidates that still have an outside chance of winning New Hampshire — Rubio and Christie — to break out of the pack and challenge Trump there. Though he thinks of himself as a future president, the truth is, Bush is in no better position to think about winning than John Kasich or Carly Fiorina, who have run better campaigns but lack his money and are stuck in low single digits.
Bush has too much money and too much family pride to consider dropping out, something that a politician does only when they have no other alternatives. But if Jeb is serious about stopping the man that has made his life miserable he should consider doing so soon. Being Trump’s comic foil is a formula for continued humiliation, not comebacks. The more therapy time he takes until he bows to the inevitable the better it will be for Trump and the less likely it will be that the GOP can nominate a candidate that can beat Hillary Clinton.
