If he hadn't given himself that exclamation point on his campaign signs, it's a sure bet no one would be attaching such upbeat punctuation to anything associated with Jeb! Bush these days. Except maybe his slide in the polls—"Jeb! Bush slides to fifth in national poll!" Maybe. By now even the pathetic poll standing of the former front-runner doesn't seem like an exclamation point event.
But Jeb! is promising to, well, not be quite so pathetic. In Miami, at the opening of a new campaign office, he even did a little striptease:
"The party that I believe in..." he said as he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a red "Reagan Bush '84" T-shirt. Getting his point, the crowd drowned him out with cheers.
Hubba hubba. Bush's other big tactic is to show that he's the grown-up in the clown car by basically rolling his eyes at Donald Trump's current dominant position in the Republican primary, suggesting that he's content to wait out the Trump boom and receive disillusioned Trump voters with open arms when they come to their senses. At a recent New Hampshire event:
"Let’s talk about Donald Trump," he said. "As Stephen Colbert said, 'Let’s talk about the big orange elephant in the room.'"
The crowd laughed, so Bush continued: "That’s humor, Donald, don’t tweet. Please. Please. Please. Go to sleep."
Trump often sends out his harshest Twitter attacks late at night, Bush said, meaning that his phone starts vibrating in the middle of the night with notifications about the latest insults.
Bush concluded: "I think, over time, people are going to want people that sit behind the big desk who can actually do it, that’s not a creature of Washington, that has ideas that are tangible."
(Side note: Does anyone believe that Jeb! actually has his phone set up to push Twitter notifications directly to him? Because that would be an added note of pathos, if true.)
The problem for Bush is not just that Trump has taken the lead, though. It's all the other candidates polling between Trump and Bush, and Bush's own weak performance. At the start of this campaign, one widespread assumption was that the Republican establishment would come together behind Bush and against whatever unpalatably, overtly extremist candidate had emerged as the alternative. The Republican establishment must still be looking for its candidate to come together behind, now with the intent of defeating Trump. But Bush's weak performance has to have them hoping another halfway plausible choice emerges.