“Well, it’s interesting,” Rubio began. “Over the last few weeks, I’ve listened to Jeb as he walked around the country and said that you’re modelling your campaign after John McCain, that you’re going to launch a furious comeback the way he did, by fighting hard in New Hampshire and places like that, carrying your own bag at the airport. You know how many votes John McCain missed when he was carrying out that furious comeback that you’re now modelling after?”
Rather than answering the question, or doing something else to knock Rubio off balance, Bush said that McCain wasn’t his senator. “Well, let me tell you,” Rubio said. “I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record. The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.” Bush mumbled something, but the applause for Rubio virtually drowned him out. “Here’s the bottom line,” Rubio went on. “My campaign is going to be about the future of America, it’s not going to be about attacking anyone else on this stage. I will continue to have tremendous admiration and respect for Governor Bush. I’m not running against Governor Bush, I’m not running against anyone on this stage. I’m running for President because there is no way we can elect Hillary Clinton to continue the policies of Barack Obama.”
I wrote all of this down at length, because it was what the political pros call “a moment”
.. Rubio said, “The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC. It is called the mainstream media.” With that, he went into a little spiel about the favorable coverage that Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the Benghazi committee received, claiming, “It was the week she got exposed as a liar”—a reference to public statements Clinton made linking the attack on U.S. installations in Libya with an anti-Muslim video. “But she has her super PAC helping her out, the American mainstream media.” Given the well-known antagonism between the Clinton campaign and parts of the mainstream media, including the New York Times, this was an outrageous charge, but it was one that will play well on conservative talk shows.
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.
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.
The Real Value of Jeb’s “Unfortunate Comments”
George W.’s description of himself, in the 2000 campaign, as a “compassionate conservative” was brilliantly vague—liberals heard it as “I’m not all that conservative,” and conservatives heard it as “I’m deeply religious.” It was about him as a person, not a program. Jeb’s slogan, “Right to rise,” is harder-edged, more specific in its implications, less personal, and easier to attack.
.. No less than liberals, conservatives feel themselves to be perpetual underdogs, because the other side’s main selling point, the provision of government benefits to people, is far more immediately appealing. Conservatives see themselves as having the challenge of arguing that you really shouldn’t want the goodies the Democrats are offering you. That’s the place where Bush’s unfortunate comment about taking care of you with free stuff seems to come from.
.. Bill Clinton’s typically centrist attempt to address the larger issue was to say, in his second inaugural address, that government was not the problem but neither was it the solution. Who can argue with that?
.. It seems possible that, in a year, we might have two candidates who openly disagree, both about the proper role of government in theory and about many specific programs in practice. That would be wonderful, because voters would have an unusually clear sense of the choice they are making.