Jeb and Hillary: A Tale of Two Establishment Favorites
On Friday, as Hillary Clinton was basking in the reaction to her marathon appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters that the hour between nine and ten o’clock on Thursday night, after the hearing finally finished, was the campaign’s best fund-raising hour yet.
.. Meanwhile, the campaign of the supposed Republican front-runner, Jeb Bush, was letting it be known that it was laying off people and slashing its payroll by forty per cent.
.. In virtually monopolizing media coverage and subjecting Bush to months of public criticism, the New York billionaire has transformed the dynamics of the G.O.P. race in a way that almost nobody anticipated—a point the managers of the Bush campaign acknowledged in an internal memo announcing the cost cuts. “We would be less than forthcoming if we said we predicted in June that a reality television star supporting Canadian-style single-payer health care and partial-birth abortion would be leading the G.O.P. primary,” the memo said.
.. If Bush were wowing the world with innovative and substantive policy proposals, his verbal shortcomings could perhaps be overlooked. But he isn’t. His tax-cutting economic plan, which he claims will increase G.D.P. growth to four per cent a year, is largely based on wishful thinking. His foreign-policy speeches are so vague that they’re hard to evaluate. On social issues, such as guns and abortion, he has said little to distinguish himself from the G.O.P. pack. In 2000, his brother George ran on the platform of “compassionate Conservatism,” which was his way of distinguishing himself from Newt Gingrich and other Republican bomb throwers. Jeb’s only memorable slogan is “Jeb!”
.. Indeed, it now appears possible that his entire campaign is based on two false premises.
The first is that Republican voters want a shift to the center.
.. The second shaky premise is the notion that Republicans are keen on restoring the Bush dynasty.