National media have begun to portray a “battle for the soul” within the Republican Party pitting the far right against “Jeb” Bush. In pretending that the scion of George Herbert Walker Bush is anything but an extremist himself, it is convenient to contrast him with people whose politics amount to personality disorders.
We might go point by point, policy area to policy area. The exercise would be pointless.
This version of the Bush plague is no more liberal than the others were. To be sure, few have actually called Dubya 2.0 a progressive—they have however sought to differentiate him from those to whom he is very similar. Passing off an extremist as a “moderate” is a clear sign of how discredited “modern conservatism” has become.
We should not be surprised if the powers of having a famous last name inoculate this Bush from a serious examination of the direction he would lead the country and world. Perhaps he will cut through the throng of right-wing hopefuls in the Republican nominating process. He may glide effortlessly to the front of the pack, or rise to the fore. These are not giants he is competing against, of course.
Every report about Bush as anything other than a darling of the far right amounts to another coat of lipstick on a pig.
Rather than trying to refute his record, identifying the many areas where his positions are identical to his extremist rivals for the Republican coronation, we should be asking people why those positions are so toxic.
Mislabeling a chronic regressive politician based upon a fantasy that they are less malignant than their brethren would not only be inaccurate, it would be equivalent to supporting the lie.
As he seeks to foist himself upon us, Bush will attempt to contrast himself with faceless, nameless ideologues with which he differs little if at all. His “strategery” in his brother’s phrase, will amount to shadowboxing phantoms.
Bush and his cohorts in the “battle for the mantle” of the non-Democratic party must face a dual challenge. First, they must appeal to the malevolent crowd who crown their nominee. Second, they have to rebrand themselves immediately (or simultaneously) as optimistic, healthy alternatives to the Democratic nominee. In this endeavor they may count upon some support from true progressives who will help to muddy the waters with claims that there “is little difference between” our nominee and the other party’s.
We cannot afford to be complicit in this. The fact that Bush is already running to the left relative to his true philosophy is solid evidence of how fully the American people have repudiated the disastrous creed of the angry white men of his caucus.
Bush is in a peculiar purgatory. He can neither vociferously repudiate even the most backward conceits of the Reagan retreads nor endorse more rational alternatives. This is a hell the junior member of the Bush cabal deserves.
The claim that “Jeb” is more intellectually curious than his brother is, true or not, can hardly be considered a selling point. The fetid Dubya regime stands as a warning to the nation, and a monument to the harm one sold as “no worse than” another option may be.
The general public [read: “low information voter,” if you wish] rejects both the political left and the right, but for different reasons.
While huge portions of the electorate—and the at-large population, whether they vote or not—support our goals, they often question the practicality of our plans. That we sometimes struggle to explain how we might achieve our aims goes a certain distance toward supporting their qualms. We can always improve the manner in which we present the ways we would like to change the world.
The Republican quandary is very different. The worldview they offer is one that people usually reject. Their advantage (besides being supported by the affluent sliver of the population) has resided in their ability to express brutally the means by which they would achieve their ends. Proudly un-nuanced, they have convinced many that they represented “strength,” when theirs is the power of the bully. Orwellian projections have smoothed over some mighty rough edges. Their moral accountability is no more significant than their financial acumen.
For Jeb Bush and his allies to seek to distance himself from the staunchest of right-wingers amounts to the death rattle of Reaganomics becoming much louder; un-ignorably earsplitting, in fact. The thunderous denials of orthodoxy—spoken quietly and glibly or shouted stridently in speeches, by the would-be candidate or his supporters—all in all it represents a repudiation of the small “c” conservatism they have tried to shove down our throats for generations.
This would be a positive development, if their revulsion at their own dogma was genuine. Alas, we come to the main point: This is a sham.
Bush seeks to distance himself from the fruits of the Cheney/Bush years because he must. After years of lambasting President Obama for having insufficiently repaired the damage inflicted by his sibling and the heartless Dick Cheney, Republicans know they can’t bear a factual comparison between the outcome for citizens during the administrations of the last three plus decades.
Every job that President Obama’s policies have helped to create has been one more than the combined efforts of a dozen years of futility under the direction of the Bush family.
We need not bury our heads in the sand. Neither President Obama nor President Clinton was flawless. Many of us have had significant differences on policy with each of them. Still, I am certainly not ashamed of either leader. Both have had strengths as well as weaknesses, but by and large they have done as well as anyone in their position could have done. Often those areas where they might have done better are marked by less than satisfying implementation of good policies than by efforts to achieve bad policy.
A big problem for Jeb Bush is that from a Republican perspective this is reversed. They have not only doggedly pursued bad policy, when it has been shown to be bad they have not revised their plans—instead they have stubbornly doubled down. Painted into a corner by an ideology long ago run amuck, Bush is shrewd enough to understand he can’t continue to sell the same wretched mess in the same deplorable ways. Not that we should expect the Bush attack machine to be mothballed.
Watch for Bush’s campaign to parallel that of a certain Southern governor. One who wanted to both revive his party and refurbish their message. The man who replaced his father in the Oval Office ran as an insurgent. The man from Hope gave people a reason (and a chance) to think things could get better.
Bush can afford the best wordsmiths; he can repackage himself and promise to “reinvent” government. Beyond the rhetoric, the solutions he offers will vary little from those supported by his father or brother, though. The Bush prescription may sound good to some; sweetening the medicine (tax cuts, anyone?) is an old scheme. The remedy is an illusion, though, and one that has lost its ability to deceive.
Even beyond the false image Bush is trying to cultivate, we have to consider those he actually would empower. Should there be a Bush III Administration, we could expect to see many of the same tired retreads—Condi and maybe Wolfie, too. More devastating would be the depraved Bush “touch” at Supreme Court nominees—this is where the Bush family might have an impact more deadly even than their geopolitics.
Preaching to the converted, I know, but we shouldn’t get bogged down in minutiae here. The Bush record—Jeb’s and his family’s—is one of the failure of right-wing approaches to governing. He knows this, that’s why he’s trying to run away from it. Some have supported Republicans in the past because they responded to politicians who “have the strength of their convictions.” Jeb can’t both qualify for this type of benefit as well as ignore the putrid positions his convictions have caused him to take. Not unless we let him.