Apparently the people surrounding Jeb Bush have looked at the rise of Donald Trump, looked at the rise of Ted Cruz, and concluded that the only way their candidate is going to make any inroads in the polls is to portray himself as just an amazing crapsack.
The Right to Rise super PAC helping Jeb Bush is airing an ad in South Carolina that features a photo of Terri Schiavo, the brain dead Pinellas County woman, who died 10 years ago despite Bush's efforts to halt the removal of her feeding tubes. The ad features a picture of Mrs. Schiavo as well as an image of what appears to be someone at the vigil outside her hospice holding a Jeb! campaign sign.
This would be the incident in which the entire Republican Party, including congressmen, senators, Gov. Jeb Bush and his smarter brother Mr. President, launched themselves into an effort to block the husband of a permanently vegetative woman with fluid where her brain should be from removing her feeding tubes and allowing her to die. They were quite proud of this effort, propped up by great steaming piles of lies that supposed the woman was alert and might not have a hollow cavity where her brain should be, and that the husband and all the woman's doctors were just lying about it. Oh, but Sen. Bill Frist knew better than those sneaky doctors and caregivers. And, most importantly, Gov. Jeb Bush knew better.
What followed was a spectacular end-run around whatever laws or rights or doctors Jeb Bush found in his way. Schiavo's hospice was turned into the center ring of a "right to life" carnival, Jeb publicly demonized the husband while pushing for clearly unconstitutional new "laws" giving Jeb Bush the supposed right to intervene over the objections of her caregivers. It was petty, it was vindictive, it was unconstitutional, it was dangerous to bystanders, and it was all based on Jeb Bush's personal religious belief that the laws governing a person's right to die should be based on what Jeb Bush thinks at the time.
Granted, however, Jeb Bush's personal super PAC is fairly certain that an appeal to model American law after arch-conservative religious beliefs peppered with fake medical experts offering fake analyses is precisely what the Republican base wants to hear. So much for "small government."
As for using images of Schiavo to boost his current political bid, Michael Schiavo has never forgiven Jeb! for turning his wife's condition into a three-ring circus, and is appropriately furious now.
"Using his disgraceful intervention in our family’s private trauma to advance his political career shows that he has learned nothing. [...] What the campaign video shows is that if he ever got his hands on the power of government again, he would do the same thing again, maybe next time to your family."
He would indeed. But it's probably still not enough to goose his numbers against The Asshole or The Fascist One.