“Jeb Bush Needs More Than Endorsements”: Highlighting The Extent To Which His Campaign Has Stalled
Tuesday proved to be another telling day in the lackluster presidential campaign of Jeb Bush.
While a new Quinnipiac poll showed the former Florida governor polling at just 4 percent in Iowa, Bush’s team was busy touting its latest endorsement from a member of Congress. Yet the latter event, coming from little-known Michigan Representative Mike Bishop, did not exactly carry the heft required to eclipse the former.
To be sure, Bush has among the healthiest portfolios among Republicans in the so-called endorsement primary that measures support with party insiders. The problem for Bush, however, is that such support means little in a year of political outsiders. To make matters worse, the relative paucity of elected officials and prominent political groups that have gotten behind Bush, compared to those that got behind his brother and other GOP nominees, highlights the extent to which his campaign has stalled.
Including Tuesday’s endorsement from Bishop, Bush has now received the backing of 26 members of the House of Representatives and three senators. He lacks a sitting governor’s formal support. At the same point in the 2000 election—roughly 10 weeks from the Iowa caucuses—George W. Bush had the backing of 133 members of the House (including then-Speaker Dennis Hastert) and 24 senators, as well as 26 governors, according to data from James Madison University political scientist Marty Cohen, who co-wrote The Party Decides, a study of the endorsement primary.
“George W. Bush was in a far stronger position at this point in the race than his brother,” said David Karol, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and a co-author with Cohen. “There’s almost no comparison.”
The many early endorsements in 2000—along with huge financial advantages—helped George W. Bush clear the field, whereas the younger Bush finds himself in a race in which many candidates are vying for endorsements and key endorsers who are waiting to see who emerges intact from the fight before they loan names and organizations to candidates.
“The party is not really decided in effect yet,” Cohen said, comparing the tight GOP race to what the website FiveThirtyEight has calculated is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 447-to-2 lead over Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic endorsement primary.
Among 2016 Republicans, Jeb Bush is ahead in the endorsement primary—by FiveThirtyEight’s weighting as well as a simple count of nods from current national officeholders—far eclipsing polling front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Along with Senator Ted Cruz, however, those outsider candidates have managed to secure endorsements from some influential figures who don’t hold office but can help mobilize voters on their preferred issues—a group that the Party Decides authors find at least as powerful as elected support. Businessman Carl Icahn has tossed his support to Trump, for instance, and former General Electric CEO Jack Welch is officially backing Cruz.
Karol ascribes Jeb Bush’s slowness to lure high profile endorsers to being out-of-step with the base on key issues including immigration as well as to his personality.
“He’s just also not a compelling candidate,” he said. George W. Bush, by contrast, had “better political instincts and also more appeal, more personality.”
The organizational strength that Bush’s team often uses to sell him to prospective endorsers has not sped up the process any. That infrastructure was supposed to be able to power him through the March states after rivals ran out of staff and money, doesn’t much distinguish him anymore.
A super-PAC working on Bush’s behalf has also failed to convince would-be endorsers through its massive advertising efforts. Since Sept. 1, Right to Rise has purchased 3,749 TV spots in Iowa TV markets at an estimated cost of more than $3 million, according to data compiled by the ad tracking firm Kantar/CMAG. This makes the super-PAC the largest ad buyer in the state by far. The next closest competitor (the pro-Bobby Jindal group Believe Again) had bought just half as much in Iowa before their candidate dropped out of the race.
Yet even as Right to Rise has poured millions into the race, endorsements for Bush have slowed, with only two national elected officials lending their names to his cause in November. Senator Marco Rubio, whom many election watchers see as Bush’s chief rival for establishment support, racked up nine new endorsers this month, more than doubling his previous slate.
On the debate stage, where a strong performance could lure more high profile endorsements, Bush hasn’t done himself any favors.
“His performance in the debates is what was weak to say the least, and that made some people think twice,” said Cohen, of James Madison University.
The Bush team continues to emphasize the difference between this year’s race and the one his brother ran.
“Our focus is on how Jeb’s endorsements and support compare with the people he is currently running against for the presidency, among which is not his brother George,” said spokeswoman Allie Brandenburger.
The best hope for Bush, Cohen said, might be the fact that he continues to stay on top in the endorsement primary despite his challenges in the popular surveys.
“I’m a little surprised that he’s managed to pull some congressional endorsements in the last week of two,” he said. “Maybe his campaign does remain viable because of that.”
By: Ben Brody, Bloomberg Politics, November 25, 2015; John McCormick Contributed to this article.
“Pretending Fiction Is Fact”: Trump, Carson Blame Media For Their Bogus 9/11 Claim
It looked as if Donald Trump’s bizarre lie about 9/11 had run its course, but the Republican presidential campaign apparently wants to keep the discussion going a little longer – even throwing in a conspiratorial twist.
To briefly recap, the GOP frontrunner insists he saw news reports from 9/11 that Trump believes show “thousands and thousands” of Jersey City residents of Middle Eastern descent cheering when the Twin Towers fell. Those reports do not exist, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from repeating the claim, over and over again, in recent days.
Team Trump has had multiple opportunities to walk this back. As TPM noted, it’s instead doing the opposite.
Donald Trump’s campaign manager on Tuesday accused the media of coordinating an elaborate conspiracy to deny the billionaire’s claim that “thousands and thousands” of New Jersey residents cheered the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“For the mainstream media to go out and say that this didn’t happen is just factually inaccurate,” Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said in an interview with Breitbart News. “We know it happened.”
Right Wing Watch posted the audio of Lewandowski’s comments, in which he pretends fiction is fact.
Trump’s special counsel, Michael Cohen, added on CNN yesterday that his client’s numbers may be off, but that shouldn’t matter. “Whether it’s ‘thousands and thousands’ or a thousand people or even just one person, it’s irrelevant,” he argued, adding, “What’s important is that there are bad people among us.”
Except, that doesn’t make any sense. Trump has argued, repeatedly, that he saw video footage of thousands of people in New Jersey celebrating a devastating terrorist attack. Now his lawyer is saying it could have been one guy and we shouldn’t be too picky about the details, while his campaign manager continues to insist the imaginary video exists, even if no one can find it, and this is all part of a conspiracy to help elect an “establishment candidate,” who’ll be “controlled by the special interests.”
All of this is seen as necessary, of course, to justify Trump’s vision of registering Muslim Americans and spying on houses of worship.
Ben Carson, who endorsed Trump’s bogus claim before changing his mind a few hours later, is also trying to blame news organizations. Politico reported yesterday:
Ben Carson continued to walk back his assertion on Monday night that, like Donald Trump, he also saw video footage of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11, blaming the media in the process for having “an agenda.”
“Well what we were talking about was the reaction of Muslims after the 9/11 attack, and if they were in a celebratory mood,” the retired neurosurgeon and current Republican candidate told Fox News’ “The Kelly File.” “And you know, I was really focusing on that it was an inappropriate thing to do, no matter where they were. They asked me: Did I see the film? I did see the film. I don’t know where they were, but I did see a film of Muslims celebrating. And I was making the point that it was inappropriate.”
He added that reporters “had an agenda” when they asked about this on Monday.
For the record, here’s the exact transcript Carson is referring to:
Q: Dr. Carson, were American Muslims in New Jersey cheering on 9/11 when the towers fell = did you hear about that or see that?
Carson: Yes.
Q: Yes. Can you expand on that?
Carson: Well, you know, there are going to be people who respond inappropriately to virtually everything. I think that was an inappropriate response. I don’t know if on the basis of that you can say all Muslims are bad people. I really think that would be a stretch.
Q: But did you see that happening though on 9/11?
Carson: I saw the film of it, yes.
Q: In New Jersey?
Carson: Yes.
His staff said a few hours later that Carson was actually referring to video footage from the Middle East, and as of yesterday, the candidate himself is eager to blame the media.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 25, 2015
“The Disturbing Truth About Marco Rubio”: The Establishment’s Favorite Is Running An Extremist, Islamophobic Campaign
I’ve probably written at least one or two of them during my career, but I’m generally not a big fan of the “Moderate Politician X is actually not very moderate!” genre of Op-Eds. My reasons are both stylistic and substantive. It’s hard to do anything interesting on such well-trod ground, and these labels, by their very nature, are relative and in constant flux.
Put differently, the center in 2015 isn’t where it was in 1980. And while politicians have a role in shifting the Overton window in one direction or another, they are mostly reactive creatures. To paraphrase Marx: Politicians can choose which ideological space to occupy within the politics of their era. But the era itself, that’s no more up to them than it is to you or me. (I doubt that, say, Ronald Reagan would support gun control if he were running for office today.)
That said, though, the 2016 presidential campaign has already proven to be special, shall we say, in a few regards. And the one that’s been on my mind lately has to do with this whole idea of what it means to be a moderate. Because while it’s a little cheap — or at least unenlightening — to use the politics of a generation ago to slam a candidate as inconsistent or radical, I think it’s a different thing if the timeframe isn’t measured in decades but rather months and weeks.
Which brings me to Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida currently seeking the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Despite at one point being seen as too right-wing to make it to the Senate (this was before the Tea Party really got going; a simpler, more innocent time) Rubio has been described throughout his presidential campaign as coming from the party’s supposedly reasonable, establishment-friendly wing. He is, we’re told, one of the “adults.”
Back when the campaign was largely concerned with the issue of immigration, and when Donald Trump’s rank demagoguery was the standard against which all the other Republicans were measured, this was a defensible characterization. But now that the campaign has, in the wake of the Paris attacks, become almost exclusively about ISIS and counter-terrorism, Rubio’s moderate label is wholly undeserved. Moderate? He is anything but.
Rubio has always aligned himself with the über-hawkish, neoconservative wing of the GOP when it comes to foreign policy. But while he’s long been almost John McCain-like in his willingness to drop bombs on other people — even once going so far as to chide his fellow Republicans for not wanting to bomb Libya more — it’s only lately that Rubio’s generic militarism, which he happily unsheathed against countries as dissimilar as China and Cuba, has drifted toward outright Islamophobia.
Take his response to Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments about closing down mosques, for example. Whereas Rubio has halfheartedly attempted to steer Republicans away from demonizing Hispanic people, when it comes to Muslims, it appears, his goal is to one-up “the Donald.” Rather than shoot down Trump’s flagrant disregard for the basic small-l liberal principle of religious freedom, Rubio criticized Trump for not going far enough.
“It’s not about closing down mosques,” Rubio told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Thursday. “It’s about closing down anyplace — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an Internet site — anyplace where radicals are being inspired.” The goal shouldn’t be to only shutter houses of worship, Rubio insisted, but “whatever facility is being used … to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States.”
His complete lack of interest in the First Amendment notwithstanding, some journalists have argued that Rubio wasn’t making such a sweeping threat. Rubio was saying he’d go after radicals, they say, not Muslims! There’s a big difference! And, indeed, there is. But that reassurance would be a whole lot more reassuring if the distinction were one that Rubio, too, believed in. Judging by another recent utterance of his, though, it seems likely that it is not.
Here’s what Rubio said last weekend in response to a question about the phrase “radical Islam,” which most Democrats, for reasons both strategic and moral, try to avoid. The emphasis is mine and [sic] throughout:
I don’t understand it. That would be like saying we weren’t at war with Nazis because we were afraid to offend some Germans who may have been members of the Nazi party, but weren’t violent themselves. We are at war with radical Islam, with an interpretation of Islam by a significant number of people around the world who they believe now justifies them in killing those who don’t agree with their ideology. This is a clash of civilizations.
As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall has noted, this comment has not received nearly the amount of attention that it should. Because while it’s nothing new to hear the violent extremism of ISIS or al Qaeda compared to Nazism, it’s much less common to hear someone of stature imply that all Muslims are morally equivalent to Nazis. Not Germans, mind you, but Nazis — which means, of course, that Islam is equivalent to the Nazi Party.
So in the span of about a month, Rubio has not only vowed to shut down any forum where Muslims congregate that he deems threatening, but also made clear that he sees all Muslims as inherently suspect; as equivalent to perhaps the most destructive, violent and evil organization in human history, in fact. They say Marco Rubio is a moderate. Does that sound to you like moderation?
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, November 21, 2015
“I’ve Seen America’s Future And It’s Not Republican”: The Policy Vacuum Of Movement Conservatism
It is true that the media is having a bit of a feeding frenzy in their attempt to “vet” the latest front-runner in the Republican presidential nominating contest – Ben Carson. But in the midst of all that, this line from a column by Amy Davidson stood out to me:
A certain number of Republicans turned to Carson because the other candidates seemed even less plausible to them.
That was basically my reaction to the last GOP presidential debate. Initially, I looked forward to John Kasich’s attempt to come out swinging against the rhetoric he called “crazy.” But when he actually did it, all he had to offer as an alternative were the same-old Republican policies of tax cuts and a balanced budget (i.e., the “voodoo economics” of trickle-down) that were completely discredited during the Bush/Cheney years. That’s when I realized why the so-called “establishment candidates” haven’t been able to gain any traction against the rabble-rousers…they’ve got nothing.
That is basically the same conclusion reached by “movement conservative refugee” Michael Lind.
Why isn’t the old-time conservative religion working to fire people up any more? Maybe the reason is that it’s really, really old. So old it’s decrepit.
Lind goes on to talk about the birth of the modern conservative movement 60 years ago with the founding of the National Review by William F. Buckley, Jr. That was followed by Barry Goldwater’s failed presidential candidacy and Ronald Reagan’s eventual success. But by then, the strains were beginning to show.
Yet by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By the 1970s, Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea of “rollback” in the Cold War and made their peace with the more cautious Cold War liberal policy of containment. In the 1960s, Reagan denounced Social Security and Medicare as tyrannical, but as president he did not try to repeal and replace these popular programs. When he gave up the confrontational evil-empire rhetoric of his first term toward the Soviet Union and negotiated an end to the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev in his second term, many conservatives felt betrayed…
Indeed, it’s fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right—repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution—have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.
Lind suggests that this should have resulted in “an intellectual reformation on the American right in the 1990s.” But instead, Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism returned in an even more radical form in the 2000’s. The result was 2 failed wars in the Middle East, huge federal deficits and the Great Recession. And once again, rather than engage in an intellectual reformation, establishment conservatives initially embraced the post-policy strategy of obstruction and eventually drilled down even farther on the failed policies of the past.
Combine all that with fear-mongering about changing demographics/social mores and heated talk about a “world on fire” and you get a policy vacuum that has been filled by the likes of candidates like Trump and Carson.
It is impossible to know with any certainty how all this will play out. But unless/until conservatives come to grips with their own policy failures and re-think their whole ideological foundation (i.e., incorporate some of their own advice about personal responsibility rather than blaming others), I’d say that Stan Greenberg is right when he says, “I’ve seen America’s future – and it’s not Republican.”
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 7, 2015
“For Better Or Worse, You Be The Judge”: Speaker Paul Ryan Is The Tea Party’s Greatest Triumph
People of all political convictions should be excited about Paul Ryan’s assumption of the House speaker’s gavel. Even if you disagree with Ryan’s fiscally conservative politics, you have to admit that the Wisconsin congressman is smart, focused on policy, and generally an honest broker. Regardless of your political affiliation, we should all be happy when the political process puts someone of this caliber in such an important job.
Which raises the question: How did we get such a good speaker?
The short answer is this: Credit the Tea Party.
Without the Tea Party, you wouldn’t have the House Freedom Caucus, made up mostly of rambunctious, hardcore, conservative back-benchers. Without the rabble-rousing Freedom Caucus, John Boehner probably wouldn’t have been driven to resign, and Kevin McCarthy probably wouldn’t have been driven out of the speakership race. Paul Ryan is not exactly a Tea Party firebrand. But he is still highly respected within the Tea Party. And they paved the way to his speakership.
For all of the bleating in opinion columns about the supposed anti-intellectualism of the Tea Party, Ryan’s policy seriousness is very much part of his movement appeal. Tea Partiers (and I count myself among them) are serious about reforming government, and a great many of them actually do understand that you need a serious plan to get it done, not just theatrics. People in the Tea Party also know they’re often disdained as simpletons by elites on both sides of the aisle, and so they very much respect credentialed people who they feel are part of their camp. This is at least partly why the Tea Party likes Ted Cruz (former Supreme Court clerk!) and Ben Carson (former neurosurgeon!).
Another key: The conservative base feels betrayed by politicians they elect who then turn around to pass moderate policies, and they want to see credibility from politicians. The best way to assert credibility is by picking a fight on an unpopular issue. Paul Ryan first became a national figure because he took on entitlement reform, the third rail in U.S. politics. The Tea Party admires his bravery and honesty in sticking to his conservative principles, even when much of the American media and political establishment crush him for it.
I like John Boehner, but it’s clear that he is an insider politician with little taste for serious policy wonkery. He lacks the courage to put forward an ambitious entitlement reform plan on his own. And so it was with the previous Republican speakers of the House. The Tea Party-backed Speaker Ryan, on the other hand, is serious about conservative ideas, and bold in promoting them.
I point this out because this isn’t just true in the House. In general, the Tea Party has elevated a better class of politician. There’s Marco Rubio, who has put forward innovative plans on taxes, on higher education, on jobs with wage subsidies, and, at least until he got cold feet, was a leader on immigration reform (another third rail). There’s Rand Paul who, as a libertarian, is someone I don’t agree with on every issue, but certainly brings much-needed representation of that perspective in the Senate (along with the admirable libertarian Justin Amash in the House, who personally explains every single vote on his Facebook page). There’s Mike Lee who is quickly shaping up to be one of the most important policy leaders in the Senate, taking charge on everything from tax reform to criminal justice reform and even defeating the Big Government Egg Cartel in his spare time (bet you didn’t know that was a thing).
There have been a few Tea Party misfires, like Ted Cruz and that “I’m not a witch” lady, but seven years into the Tea Party, it is now clear that overall, the movement has brought to Washington a class of politicians that, whether you agree with them on the issues or not, are a refreshing improvement over their establishment predecessors.
That’s something everyone should celebrate. So keep it in mind next time you see another column about supposed Tea Party know-nothingism.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, October 29, 2015
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