John Dickerson’s piece on the difficulties Jeb Bush would face as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is perfect. What I mean is that Dickerson wrote everything that I would write but he did a better job of it than I could have achieved. I don’t really have anything to add, except to note that a Jeb candidacy would be even more divisive and disruptive to the conservative coalition than I at first anticipated.
What I think would be the most interesting part of it is that it would give the party base the opportunity to make an official break from the Bush family. In rejecting Bush, they could finally settle, once and for all, that they are the party of some mutant form of Reaganism and not aligned with the moderation associated with Poppy and to a lesser degree with his son, George.
It’s telling that the so-called “donor class” or Republican “Establishment” is ready to line up with Jeb as if they hadn’t been to this rodeo three times before, each time with worse results. If the base were to reject Jeb, which seems quite possible, it would also be divorcing its donor class. What would happen next would depend a lot on who the base chose instead. If they chose Rand Paul, much of the Republican Establishment would just support Hillary Clinton and we’d see a result like 1972 when a big chunk of the Democratic Establishment held its nose and supported Nixon’s reelection.
If the party base settled on someone more palatable, we might not see such an extreme fissure. In a way, I hope Jeb runs just so I can see how this all pans out. On the other hand, if he somehow wins the nomination, he might revive the Republican Party, which is something I at once dread and welcome.
