Needing George W. help is the kiss of death...

Bush family gathers to rescue Jeb 

His famous family rallies around to attempt to revive his flagging campaign.

By Eli Stokols

This closed-door summit for Jeb Bush’s richest donors was meant to be a pep rally, a reunion for loyalists eager to celebrate the family legacy with two former presidents.

But as George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush draw supporters together under gray skies and unrelenting rains, the gathering has become a rescue operation for a candidate who looks unable to meet the expectations of the family brand.

“The patient is either in intensive care and in need of some good doctors who can save him or being put into hospice and we’re going to see a slow death," said one K street lobbyist supporting Bush.

Indeed, the man who, it was expected, would be leading the Republican field by a mile, who raised astounding sums in his first months as a candidate, is now on life support, according to people inside the two-day meeting. With the campaign gasping for air, slashing costs, and narrowing a national strategy to a New Hampshire approach, investor confidence is cracking.

At the gathering on the fourth floor of the cavernous Hilton Americas Houston hotel, donors moved casually through the hallways, smiling while brushing past reporters gathered outside the meeting rooms. Upstairs in the presidential suite, Barbara Bush handed out to adoring donors the Jeb! bumper stickers she keeps in her walker. When Jeb Bush thanked the 150 donors for making the trip to Houston at Sunday evening’s barbecue dinner, professing his determination to win, it served as motivational fuel for many bundlers. “He seemed like he’s in a really good place, like a burden had been lifted,” said a bundler from Miami.

But behind closed doors, many donors also voiced concerns about the direction of the campaign. “Having 41 around helps take the edge off, but we all read the same newspapers and look at the same polls and it’s tough right now. There are a lot of people we thought would have written checks who aren’t on board yet,” one donor said. “In some ways, it’s reassuring being here and looking around seeing that there’s still a lot of support for Jeb.”

Sunday afternoon, in a hotel ballroom adjacent to one rented by the campaign, Mike Murphy, the strategist guiding Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC, tried to reassure donors that the media’s horse-race coverage of the campaign obscures Bush’s fundamental advantages.

He gave attendees a sneak peak of his next round of feel-good television spots, meant to inspire confidence in the candidate, and in the power of the moneyed super PAC.

But many of the bundlers who have attended the campaign’s quarterly summits (the group met in Miami in April and at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, in July) are looking less for motivation this time than for tangible evidence that the product they’re investing in is going to pay dividends.

“At this point, it’s not about motivation. All the people I know have already given,” said one Washington, D.C.-based donor who spoke privately. “The people who are left are momentum people, and they need to see that this is a train that’s going somewhere.”

This exercise in nostalgia, always meant to propel a third Bush candidacy, is instead laying bare how a family held in such high esteem by generations of Republicans no longer represents the party it once led. The few hundred well-heeled Bush-backers here Sunday night are a world apart from conservative voters who have become so resistant to dynastic politics and the GOP's establishment and donor class.

Donald Trump, whose prolonged success has confounded Bush world, mocked the Bush gathering, taunting Bush for "meeting today with mommy and daddy." As much as they loathe Trump’s unrefined brand of politics, the talk among donors in the hallways of the Hilton Americas downtown reflects the unease about his effect on the GOP primary.

Many of these dedicated Bush supporters are no longer denying that the guest of honor is unable to connect with a GOP electorate that has become increasingly fractured and stridently ideological since — and in reaction to — his brother’s presidency. And increasingly, donors say, they are no longer certain the Bush family can pull Jeb’s campaign out of its downward spiral

The advent of the tea party and the GOP’s hard lurch to the right, the rejection of the politics of compromise, and the diminishing clout of the Republican National Committee and the party as a whole all are all developments of the post-George W. Bush era. And all are phenomena impeding Jeb Bush’s path to the Republican nomination.

“I look at this party now, and I hardly recognize it,” one Florida-based donor said. “I never would have thought there would be so much mistrust of the establishment that we would prefer candidates who are angry over those who can actually lead.”

Bush, betraying his own frustration with the state of the race and Trump’s lead, raised eyebrows on Saturday by offering what sounded like an exit narrative. “I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke,” he said in South Carolina. “Elect Trump if you want that.”

Bush’s team downplayed the comment and dismissed the idea that he was thinking at all of dropping out at any point. Meetings have been scheduled with senior staffers for Monday morning, aimed at allaying these anxieties.

But whatever the root causes of the campaign’s troubles are — a populist drive among voters, Trump’s celebrity, a field too large for an establishment contender to stand out, or simply a weak frontman — some resignation is setting in among staff and supporters.

“It’s a question that’ll answer itself,” said Fred Zeidman, a longtime Bush bundler based in Houston. “Either the numbers keep going down and you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do; or the numbers will eventually improve, which is what we’re all counting on.”

On Sunday afternoon, former President George H.W. Bush, 91, and his wife, Barbara, played host to Bush’s “Commodores,” the campaign’s top donors and bundlers, at a cocktail reception — the proud patriarch, hoping to inspire additional support and greater ardor for his son.

George W. Bush will take questions from attendees Monday morning; and donors will get to pose for pictures with 41, 43, Jeb and their wives before they leave that afternoon, a historic opportunity used to incentivize bundlers who rounded up $100,000 in contributions.

Among longtime Bush supporters, befuddled by the topsy-turvy electoral climate and Jeb’s ongoing struggles, there is one common salve that soothes their worries: history. Questions about Trump or Ben Carson, for instance, are often met with wishful comparisons to Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, who each led the primary polls early in the 2012 cycle before fading.

“My party always comes down to two candidates: one to the far right, one more a consensus conservative,” said Ron Kaufman, a Boston-based GOP consultant backing Jeb who skipped the weekend summit. “And the centrist Republican has always won.”

As Jeb Bush made his way to the ballroom on Sunday afternoon where Right to Rise donors were meeting, he bumped into Murphy in the hallway. The two old friends, barred by federal law from coordinating, embraced in a quick hug before going their separate ways.

Then Bush met with the super PAC donors, who had just gotten a preview of Murphy’s next round of positive image ads. After hearing from Murphy and Bush, donors in Houston said they are trying to keep calm and trust the super PAC.

“We know that whatever the conventional wisdom says right now, it’s going to be different in three months,” said Will Weatherford, a former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. “If you’re going to tell me this guy — who’s a successful two-term governor from one of the biggest states, who’s got $100 million in a super PAC — is an underdog, we’ll take that.”

But even as Weatherford sought to project confidence, he acknowledged that Bush regaining his footing and going on to capture the nomination is not likely to happen merely as the result of naturally occurring political gravity.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m delusional.”