Please! Don't hurt me!
Hillary Clinton delivered a gangbusters oration to the National Urban League last week, earning
the only standing ovation among all the presidential contenders who attended the group's annual conference. She also delivered
several well-placed jabs to Jeb Bush's glass jaw, cleverly using his campaign slogan, "Right to Rise," as a stand-in for Bush's hollow conservative ideology:
"People can't rise if they can't afford health care," Mrs. Clinton said to applause from conventiongoers, a dig at Mr. Bush's opposition to the Affordable Care Act.
"They can't rise if the minimum wage is too low to live on," she said, a jab at his opposition to raising the federal minimum wage.
"They can't rise if their governor makes it harder for them to get a college education," she said, a critique of Mr. Bush's decision as governor to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions.
These slams,
reported Buzzfeed, earned Clinton "some of her most enthusiastic applause." Bush, speaking directly after Clinton, appeared "unprepared to respond,"
said the New York Times, and simply plodded along with his stumpiest stump speech line: "I believe in the right to rise in this country."
But Bush's handlers sure had a mind to hit back afterwards, with not so much as a sucker punch but a punch thrown by suckers:
On Twitter, Tim Miller, Mr. Bush's communications director, called it a "Clintonesque move to pass over chance to unite in favor of a false cheap shot."
Allie Brandenburger, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bush, followed up with an email saying, "The Urban League deserved better."
Oh, what babies! Caught entirely off-guard, all that Team Bush could do was whine and try to argue that Clinton's extremely successful body blows on their guy actually represented a flaw in
her character.
Yeah, no.
This is politics, and in politics, people punch and they punch hard. Your only option is to hit back just as hard, not complain about how hard you were hit. If Bush, whose campaign has been marred by ineptitude, chooses to fuss instead of fight, he's going to find himself on the campaign trail canvas soon enough—whether his fellow Republicans knock him down in the primary or Clinton lays him out in the general. So grab your fight cards and let's watch, because it should be a lot of fun either way.