Jeb’s quiet wingnutty past: Why he has to distance himself from… himself

[99th_Monkey]

Jeb’s quiet wingnutty past: Why he has to distance himself from… himself
All the geniuses calling Jeb Bush the "moderate" candidate in the GOP primary are missing one thing: his history
FRIDAY, FEB 13, 2015 * by HEATHER DIGBY PARTON * Salon

One of the more amusing aspects of he Republican establishment’s quest to anoint Jeb Bush as the “moderate” candidate who can bring all sides together is that the poor man is going to have to walk a tightrope made of dental floss over the next year or so — as he attempts to obscure his wingnutty past from the donor class, without alienating the right wingers he needs to vote for him. Managing these two competing constituencies is a difficult task for all the GOP presidential hopefuls, but Bush’s is perhaps the toughest.

There has been a lot of talk about how he will have to find a way to adequately explain his support for immigration reform and the Common Core education curriculum to the base, which loathes those two programs with a fervor they usually reserve for gay marriage and arugula. He seems to be picking his way through that and we’ll see soon enough if he still has the political chops he developed as Governor of Florida to successfully dogwhistle the base while offering a sheen of “reasonableness” that will keep the political press onboard the establishment train. Those issues will be in contrast with his almost maniacal adherence to the social conservative agenda in the Schiavo case and if he plays his cards right it’s possible he could neutralize his heresies. It will take skill and cunning he hasn’t heretofore demonstrated but you never know.

Where Bush has a more serious problem is in foreign policy and national security. Some of the reasons for that are more obvious than others. The most glaring, of course, is the fact that he’s George W. Bush’s brother. Despite what people say, W never lost the base of the party — that 28% approval rating he had at the end were the bitter-enders who loved him for his big swinging swagger. But he was unpopular with the very people the Big Money Boyz are banking on getting behind Jeb: independents and moderate Republicans. Aside from the obvious fact that Jeb doesn’t want to run against his own brother’s policies, he will have a big problem with the base if he strays too far from the right’s blood-thirsty foreign policy orthodoxy. But if he tacks too close a whole lot of normal Americans will instinctively recoil.

Luckily for Jeb, W isn’t the only Bush he can emulate. There’s his Dad, another “wartime” president whose war was substantially more popular and widely assumed to be successful even among Democrats and independents. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported that in the Dialing for Donor Dollars primary Jeb is signaling that he’s going to follow in his daddy’s footsteps rather than W’s:

Jeb Bush seemed to grapple with what course he should take on foreign policy last week at the Detroit Economic Club. He responded to a question about terrorist threats by linking the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. “We have to be engaged, and that doesn’t necessarily mean boots on the ground in every occurrence,” he said. Resisting a label for his outlook, he added: “I don’t know what that makes me—everyone has to have a type.”

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/13/jebs_quiet_wingnutty_past_why_he_has_to_distance_himself_from_himself/

[malokvale77]

1. If he would just distance himself from us.

I wish the whole fucking Bush family would go away.

[99th_Monkey]

3. +10 ~nt~

[Laura PourMeADrink]

2. Your post immediately made me think about how our last three presidents are

intellectuals. Through our Democratic belief lens they studied and they
read and they consulted and policies emerge out of that. They may not
have always been right - but people knew it wasn't some frivolous
fly-by-the-seat of your pants idea. Or in Bush's case - "what Cheney
and Daddy told me to do."

Policy through knowledge is the antithesis of the way Bush appeared to people and what
Jeb has to overcome - the skidded through college, my parents bought
my diploma persona. Steep climb, ey ?

And just like Romney's constant flip-flopping (direct result of not developing
policies the right way - through knowledge) - Jeb will be in the same boat

[Generic Other]

4. Jeb's a moderate like W was an intellectual!

“I look forward to the time when these buildings of government are empty. There would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers — silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill,” says the moderate.