A new staple of this year's national election coverage is the use of Google or Twitter traffic to judge "interest" in each candidate during their televised debates. I'm skeptical of just how much can be gleaned from such things, but every once in a while they turn in a curious nugget.
[A]ccording to Google Trends data, it wasn’t so much Bush’s policy experience that people were interested in.
The top trending question asked about him in South Carolina was, “Is Jeb Bush related to George W. Bush?”
So of the people tuning into the debate, in South Carolina, just before their own primary, took a good long look at Jeb Bush and thought to themselves—Wait, is he related to that other guy?
Several things, here. First: Is it good news or bad news for Jeb Bush that people aren't sure if he's related to George? On the one hand, being scion of the Bush family tree is the reason Jeb Bush has a political career in the first place; on the other hand, until recently he's tried his level best to downplay his bond with the Worst President Ever and his policies.
Second, this is why it is so tiring when politicians spout hoary lines about how the American people want this or the American people demand that, or when pundits write columns about what the public should think and everyone appears on television with everybody else during the Sunday shows and applaud one another for the fine points they are making and how influential they are. The American people don't know who any of you people are. I would suggest that number of persons in the general, nonprofessionally political public who have ever been truly swayed by a Fred Hiatt or David Brooks column is roughly the same number of people who are killed by stray golf balls in Florida each year.
Here we've got the hard-campaigning son of one of the few presidential dynasties in America, the brother of the last sitting president and the governor of a populous state, and the American public aren't quite sure who this low-energy fellow is. He looks familiar, though. Maybe he was on television?
Mind you, the people watching the debate and looking to the internet to answer their debate-eve questions are the ones who want to be informed, and even they're stumped as to the most basic facts about the people they're supposed to be voting for. This is good news for ... hmm. Nope, I can't think of why this would be good news for anyone.