No hurry...

Waiting for Jeb to jump

Bush is in no hurry to formally declare his candidacy, and it might be hurting his chances.

By Glenn Thrush

By the end of last week, almost everyone had jumped into the pool. Almost everyone except John Ellis Bush, who still sits at the water’s edge of the 2016 presidential campaign, suit dry except for the stray splash thrown his way by his jostling Republican rivals Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

It wasn’t clear at the time, but is increasingly so now, that Jeb Bush’s decision last December to signal, but not formally announce, his candidacy was a short-term logistical masterstroke befitting his family’s reputation for mastering the mechanics of elections. His undeclared status has freed him to raise what aides are saying will be as much as $100 million from rich patrons and outside groups (the second he files presidential paperwork, he’s prevented from requesting big super PAC checks), and it has temporarily shielded him from being the target of shots many of his would-be opponents are leveling at Hillary Clinton. (Aside, that is, from lots of hand-wringing about the increasingly hereditary nature of American politics, and mockery of his insistence that he’ll be his “own man” on foreign policy.)

This inversion — building a campaign on the back of a super PAC instead of vice versa — is novel and could be a model for the future, but it also puts a lot of pressure on an opaque candidate who publicly has done little more than a set of sporadic, low-octane speeches with few specifics to offer. Given his fundraising focus, he’s already dogged by the notion, eagerly pushed by his enemies among the party’s tea party hard-liners, that he’s a bankroll in search of a soul.

Which is why we’ll see the media coverage of the Republican presidential race coalesce, and soon, around a single question: Is Bush actually the front-runner, or just a guy with a lot of money trying to buy the nomination?

A dozen or so Republican operatives and donors I spoke with last week, most of them open to a Bush candidacy, didn’t have a clue how that question will be ultimately be answered, but it’s a decisive one, and they are antsy to find out. The early polls, which show Jeb getting clobbered in Iowa, barely ahead — if at all — in New Hampshire, and trading a narrow lead nationally with his fellow Floridian Marco Rubio, are predicting a ferociously competitive campaign. But who knows how it will play out when Bush actually announces? “A month ago, the whole story was that Hillary was rusty, that she hadn’t been out there doing anything,” said a veteran GOP operative who worked on one of George W. Bush’s campaigns. “Well, she’s been out there taking hits for a month. Jeb hasn’t. It’s time to get this thing going.”

Nicolle Wallace, a White House communications director to George W. Bush who started her political life as a 25-year-old adviser to Jeb Bush in Florida, also sees undeniable parallels with the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. “I think some of their strengths are parallel. Some of their strengths are on the policy side, not the retail political side. I think some of their strengths are in a room, not on a stage,” she told me during a taping of last week’s POLITICO podcast.

“I think they have some of the same weaknesses, too. They’re both in a constituent-free zone. Neither of them represents anybody right now. Neither of them is advocating on anyone’s behalf, except their own campaigns. And I think it’s awkward, frankly, for both of them.”

Bush’s campaign is slowly, inevitably pushing him into the water, nudging him into more high-stakes situations ahead of a formal announcement that could come as early as mid-June. People close to the campaign tell me he plans to do some press-the-flesh retail campaigning on a trip to New Hampshire in late May — and his Liberty University commencement address on Saturday was a risky operation, considering the rock-star reception conservative fire breather Ted Cruz received at the Jerry Falwell-founded school when he announced his candidacy there in March.

Bush, a midlife convert to Roman Catholicism, used the speech to emphasize that he is a man of deep belief — a key signifier in a party that values faith. But he also sought to differentiate himself from other candidates who more explicitly bring their religious fervor to their politics, namely Huckabee and Cruz, warning against feeding into Democratic arguments that the GOP is turning into a party of religious rigidity. “The mistake is to confuse points of theology with moral principles that are knowable to reason as well as by faith,” Bush said, pointedly refusing to bash the move toward legalizing same-sex marriage that Cruz has embraced as an affront to his faith. “And this confusion is all part of a false narrative that casts religious Americans as intolerant scolds, running around trying to impose their views on everyone.”

The timing of the Liberty address also spoke to Bush’s conflict-avoidance strategy. He skipped the crowded, potentially more contentious venue of the South Carolina Freedom Summit in Greenville attended by just about every other candidate in the field except Rand Paul and Chris Christie.

The Republican most unconstrained in his willingness to attack Bush declared his intention to run last Wednesday. Huckabee, the roly-poly former Arkansas governor who reportedly made a fortune selling a dubious diabetes cure, is viewed by most of the news media as comic relief (he once quipped that “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office,” when asked what his savior would say about the death penalty), but he could prove to be a very dangerous foil for a patrician candidate with the last name Bush.

No candidate in the race on either side is more comfortable throwing around the populist economic rhetoric than Huckabee, who, despite his $3 million mansion on the Gulf Coast and affection for private jet travel, seems genuinely irked that his party keeps pushing fancy-pants plutocrats to the top, and he appears to relish taking on Bush. The signature rhetorical move of the early 2016 Republican primary is the dual-purpose swipe: a shot at Hillary Clinton that doubles as a Bush diss. (Rubio, lumping Clinton and Bush together, recently declared, “I think the 21st century is going to be better than the 20th century.”)

Huckabee’s swipes at Bush are even less thinly veiled than that — and they are aimed directly at Bush’s big-money donor base, in mid-American populist language that could have come from leftist hero Elizabeth Warren — or William Jennings Bryan for that matter. “The Dodd-Frank banking bill was written to punish the banks that supposedly got us in trouble,” he told a small audience in South Carolina on Friday. “They are bigger now than they ever were.”

He has a knack for making personal attacks seem folksy and somehow not out of line. Back in 2008, he went on Jay Leno’s show to poke fun at Mitt Romney, who had emerged as a serious challenger to eventual GOP nominee John McCain. “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them of the guy they work with rather than the guy who laid them off,” Huckabee said, a soundbite studied, amplified and broadcast to much effect by President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign against Romney.

Huckabee is already at it again this year, with the unrestrained zeal of a man aiming less for real power than one last folk-hero turn on the national stage. “I don’t come from a family dynasty, but a working family. I grew up blue collar, not blue blood,” he said during his campaign kick-off announcement last week, with special emphasis on the final two words of the sentence. Everyone knew he was talking about Bush.

Will it matter? Huckabee’s impressive victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses makes him a force to be reckoned with, but he isn’t doing quite as well in Iowa this time — in part because voters have seen his act before, in part because Cruz is making a harder-edged appeal for evangelicals — he’s currently a middle-of-the-pack 11 percent in recent polls. But Bush is in far worse shape — at 5 percent with disapproval ratings north of 50 percent.

Of course, on the map of 2016, New Hampshire looms even larger, just as it did for Romney four years ago, but even this won’t be an easy one for Bush. A WMUR Granite State poll taken earlier this month showed him leading the increasingly packed pack with 15 percent of the vote, but Rubio is a close second at 12 percent.

That Bush is increasingly, inevitably, becoming a focal point of 2016 came as welcome news in the utilitarian, poorly air-conditioned warren of re-purposed bank back offices that serves as Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn. There was a clear feeling, for the first time, among Clinton’s inner circle last week that she won’t be alone on the firing line for long. “The whole dynamic of the race changes when the Republicans start attacking each other, when Jeb gets in,” Tom Nides, a former Clinton State Department aide close to the campaign, told me.

Indeed, while Bush-bashing is likely to become a favored new sport among the 20 Republicans clamoring for attention, Clinton’s cardinal advantage as a candidate — the absence of deep intraparty division over her candidacy — might have actually paid real dividends for the first time last week.

To the uninitiated in Clinton world, it was a week awash in badish news: Bill Clinton was on NBC during an Africa trip defending his foundation’s multiple mistakes in hyperdefensive, cringe-inducing 1990s legalese (his staff had done nothing “knowingly improper,” he said); Hillary Clinton agreed to testify in public session during House Republican hearings on Benghazi; and she drew her first declared primary opponent, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders.

But none of those hits seemed to faze the Clinton people who have begun their slow, steady occupation of the bars and brew pubs of nearby Brooklyn Heights. For the first time in her month-old candidacy, Clinton went on the offensive and pitched something bold: a promise not only to support but also to expand President Barack Obama’s immigration reform executive order, which has offered 5 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.

“I would do everything possible under the law to go even further,” Clinton told a predominantly Hispanic audience in Las Vegas on Tuesday, signaling the possibility of halting deportations for parents of “Dreamers,” children whose parents brought them to the U.S. illegally.

The national media was still chewing over the implications of the Clinton speech two days later, on Thursday, when Sanders made his formal announcement, which was easily overshadowed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and some other Republicans blasting Clinton’s idea as “amnesty,” Bush and Chris Christie dodging the question, and White House officials griping that Clinton didn’t give Obama enough credit.

No doubt, Sanders’ core case against Clinton, that she is just another defender — and major financial beneficiary — of a system that protects the ultrawealthy at the expense of everybody else will have its day when Sanders scores points in a debate or surges in an Iowa poll. “There will be a time this fall, mark my words, when Bernie Sanders or [former Maryland governor and possible Democratic presidential candidate] Martin O’Malley will have his moment,” one senior Clinton aide told me. “But it’s not going to be because we haven’t addressed issues like economic inequality.”

How much does Clinton’s left flank need protecting? Not quite as much as last time. Clinton’s people have been aggressively promoting the storyline that she is a looser, more relaxed, more authentic candidate than in 2008, but for now it’s not personality but the absence of a threatening progressive challenger — armed with an issue as damaging as her ‘yes’ vote on the Iraq War — that is allowing Clinton to go on offense. More importantly, the Clinton team believes she won’t have too much trouble debunking the notion she’s not a true liberal: Clinton will take her hits from the Warren-Sanders wing of the party for her associations with Wall Street, they say, but she is completely in step with the broader progressive agenda on jobs, unions, the environment, social issues and especially immigration.

Indeed, as Sanders was entering the race, some Clinton surrogates were making the case that the wild-haired Brooklyn native was to the right of Clinton on gun control — helpfully reminding reporters that Sanders, while representing liberal but gun-loving Vermont, has sided with the National Rifle Association on many gun-control measures, including Bill Clinton’s Brady Law.

Yet the challenges posed by Huckabee to Bush and by Sanders to Clinton are real, and rooted in a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo, a dissatisfaction that can’t help but be a liability for perhaps the two candidates in modern history most representative of the dynastic political establishment.

If they somehow manage to make it to the general election, voters will witness a multibillion-dollar dual-rebranding initiative designed to turn two American royals into commoners.

It’s already begun: Hillary’s first political act as a 2016 candidate was visiting a Chipotle, incognito, in her “Scooby Van” to order a chicken burrito bowl.

Not to be outdone, Jeb — with, no doubt, the devastating 1992 image of his father standing dumbstruck before a New Hampshire supermarket scanner in mind — insisted upon a public rebuttal. I go to Chipotle, too, Jeb insisted. Then he paused. “Drive my own car. Park my own car. Get out of my own car.”