Jeb! Bush is so bland that even when he's trying to revive a sinking campaign, there's not much to say about him. Bush's polling leads are long gone, his once-dominant fundraising is rumored to have dropped off, and confidence in his campaigning skills has eroded to the point where a just okay debate performance was seen as a step up. But hey, Wednesday night he got that just okay performance and is now
trying to capitalize, or at least keep his donors from fleeing:
To steady the Bush campaign’s financial backers, donors were invited to participate in telephone conference calls with top campaign officials late Wednesday and Thursday morning. Political advisers noted that Mr. Trump was silent for a full 37 minutes during the debate and relayed some of the positive reviews of Mr. Bush’s performance on Twitter.
Unfortunately for Bush's quest to show his campaign momentum, his big day-after-the-debate campaign event was a Las Vegas rally in a room described in the
Wall Street Journal as "half-empty" and in the
Washington Post as "half-full." And while most people seem to be in agreement that Bush did better in this week's debate than in the August one, his campaign is
still having trouble packaging it as a real win:
Sweat dripping down his face, campaign manager Danny Diaz entered the post-debate “spin room” and said: “I knew he was going to do a great job. I just need the media to give a fair characterization of it.”
Aides cited two key moments: the apology exchange with Trump, and when Bush responded to Trump’s criticism of George W. Bush by saying, “He kept us safe.”
They want a "fair characterization," but to get that, they're talking up the exchange in which Bush demanded an apology for Donald Trump insulting his wife and then fell silent when Trump refused, and the exchange in which Bush said his brother George W. "kept us safe," as if his presidency had started on September 12, 2001, and as if war was not a thing that makes many people very unsafe. If these are the things you have to brag about ...
But Bush isn't giving up. As he told the Las Vegas audience, in what passes for sparkling wit with him, "I hope that I am so brilliant and so eloquent and so high-energy that you feel compelled to caucus for me." Every day, the man is out there just making a mockery of his self-endowed exclamation point.