Some Bush strategists grumbled about what they described as an excessively large infrastructure at the headquarters. One department that will be particularly thinned out, advisers said, is the group of video producers and editors, called “Jeb TV,” that was assembled for what had been a robust digital effort.
.. “This means lean and mean, and it means that I have the ability to adapt,” he said, pointing to Mr. Trump’s unexpected rise. “Every dollar we can save in overhead is a dollar that goes on television, goes on radio, goes on media, goes on voter outreach.”
.. Whether Mr. Trump will now start spending heavily from his personal fortune on his campaign, as he has said he would do, remains unclear: He has donated roughly $1.9 million of his own money, and he has yet to spend on television.
.. A focus group of Republicans in Indianapolis this week, conducted for the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center, called Mr. Trump “self-serving” and “disturbing.” In contrast, Mr. Carson was called “wise” and “a gentleman.”
Paul Ryan and the Fund-Raising–Life Balance
According to the Times, John Boehner spent two hundred days a year on the road, attending fund-raising events or visiting donors. And that doesn’t count the coddling he did in the greater D.C. area. In that light, the modern Speaker’s job is less one of a chief operating officer than of a chief revenue officer—or, rather, the guy in charge of investor relations.
.. According to Politico, the “informal plans” being discussed within the National Republican Congressional Committee for meeting Ryan’s conditions include this one: “Committee chairmen and other members of the leadership team would need to step up their fundraising.” Perhaps that would involve something like a regional sales-team model, or one more precisely directed at particular interest groups. Donors could have more intimate relations with the committee chairs who set up hearings on the industries and the policies that interest them. They might even give more cash. (Ryan is now the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, which helps control where federal money goes.)
Paul Ryan’s Parenting Problem
While some, most notably John Boehner, have said Mr. Ryan would be able to be an effective speaker and a dad, others have been skeptical. The biggest issue seems to involve fundraising — will Paul Ryan have time to raise the money the party needs if he also wants to be home for dinner? “Speaker John Boehner raised $50 million,”said Representative Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas. “The speaker has to work more than 40 hours a week.”
These reservations aren’t surprising — many people think high-level government office is simply incompatible with being a very involved parent. But it’s not running the government that would keep Mr. Ryan from his kids — it’s raising the money to keep Republicans in office, many of whom actually oppose running the government.
This debate raises the intriguing possibility that politicians might be able to tuck their kids into bed if they didn’t have to spend large portions of their time convincing wealthy people to donate vast sums of money to their campaigns. Unfortunately for Mr. Ryan and everybody else, we’re not likely to explore that possibility anytime soon.
What Would Jeb Do? An ex-front-runner looks to his brother’s advisers.
Bush was pilloried by Democrats for his “stuff happens” remark, but he defended it, telling me that the government doesn’t have a solution to every problem, and that sometimes government action makes matters worse. Some variety of a laissez-faire philosophy is standard for modern Republicans, at least on most domestic issues. But, increasingly in recent months, Bush, like a number of his colleagues, has been making the case for aggressive intervention abroad. Two days earlier, Russia had carried out its first air strikes in Syria. When I asked Bush how he would respond if he were President, he said that it was the lack of American action that had created the dire situation in Iraq and Syria, and invited the Russian military to bolster the Assad regime.
.. Bush’s view represents a return to a simplistic interventionism that seemed discredited in the wake of the Iraq debacle.
.. Obama thinks that intractable foreign-policy crises should be guided by the physician’s maxim of “first, do no harm”—or, as his aides have said privately, “Don’t do stupid shit.” To Republican hawks, this sounds like a willful and dangerous abdication of American power and influence.
.. When Jeb Bush began his campaign, he enlisted as advisers some of the realists from his father’s camp, including the former Secretary of State James Baker. But the heaviest contingent consisted of his brother’s liege men: Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department official who made the ideological case for invading Iraq; John Hannah, who had been an adviser to Dick Cheney and pushed bad intelligence into Colin Powell’s famous speech at the U.N. making the case for war; Porter Goss, the former C.I.A. director who condoned waterboarding as an interrogation technique; and Stephen Hadley, the former national-security adviser, who took the blame for false assertions that President Bush made about nuclear yellowcake allegedly sought by Saddam Hussein from Niger.
.. When voters went to the polls in November, 2008, Bush’s job-approval rating dipped to twenty per cent, the lowest of any outgoing President in the history of polling.
.. “There are some politicians in Washington who approach foreign military action as if they’re playing Risk,” he said. “They want to deploy troops and command them in battle.” He added, “A number of politicians treat American boots on the ground as a talisman to demonstrate that they’re really tough.”
.. As a former city commissioner in West Miami and then a state legislator, Rubio knew the foreign-policy issues that important Florida constituencies care about, such as the Jewish community’s staunchly pro-Israel views and the Cuban-American community’s fierce opposition to Castro. He had little experience with broader foreign-policy questions.
.. During the 2013 fight over budget cuts, Rubio advocated for government-spending reform. He has since grown less cautionary, arguing for an increase in military spending and calling it the “most important obligation of the federal government.”
.. Rubio’s foreign policy is a clear response to Obama’s alleged retreat from the world. The President’s biggest mistakes, in this view, were all failures to intervene more aggressively.
.. When Baker appeared on Jeb Bush’s list, neoconservatives expressed alarm. His foreign-policy views—diplomacy, stability, and serious doubts about interventions requiring large numbers of U.S. troops—are closer to Obama’s than to George W. Bush’s. Jeb Bush faced a revolt from donors and excoriation in neoconservative publications.
.. At the J Street dinner, Baker criticized Benjamin Netanyahu for “diplomatic missteps and political gamesmanship,” and spoke about his own role in the first Bush Administration’s withholding of loan guarantees to Israel in order to pressure the government to halt settlement construction.
.. Morton Klein, the president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, told Bloomberg that Bush’s association with Baker would cost the candidate: “There are many mega-donors who will not be with him because of that.”
.. “What you need to know is that who I listen to when I need advice on the Middle East is George W. Bush.” The Bush campaign later insisted that Jeb was speaking narrowly about Israeli policy. Either way, the message was clear: the hawks were back in control of Republican foreign policy.