Daddy... They don't like me...

The Bush blame game begins

With Jeb struggling, supporters, staff and donors start pointing the finger at the super PAC’s chief, Mike Murphy.

By Anna Palmer and Eli Stokols

They think he wasted money on everything from an iPad-sized video mailer to direct mail for donors in states that don’t yet matter. They think his attacks on Marco Rubio are doing more harm than good. And they worry that, at the end, all he will have accomplished is the destruction of the Bush family brand.

The big-money supporters fueling Jeb Bush’s super PAC have found their boogeyman: Mike Murphy, a sharp-witted, Twitter-obsessed veteran GOP ad man who runs Right to Rise.

If Bush’s campaign ends with anything other than the GOP nomination, blame is certain to be widespread. But that donors and GOP operatives are already sniping at Murphy before the first votes are cast demonstrates the depth of frustration and displeasure with the Bush-world loyalist.

“It looks like they’re blowing the whole thing up, like even if Jeb can’t win, they’re not going to let anyone else win either,” said a Florida Bush backer and Right to Rise donor who worked on Bush’s gubernatorial campaigns and in his administration. “You might as well light all of this money on fire. Most of all, they’re hurting the reputation of a really great man.”

POLITICO interviewed nearly two dozen Right to Rise donors and Bush supporters, and all blamed Murphy for a super PAC strategy that has failed to boost their struggling candidate. Multiple advisers to the Right to Rise super PAC concede privately that the $40 million spent on positive ads aimed at telling Bush’s story has yielded no tangible dividends.

Among the many and varied complaints, several Republicans close to the Bush campaign have questioned the PAC’s decision to let John Kasich own the airwaves in New Hampshire this fall, allowing the Ohio governor to get a foothold in a state where Bush must perform well to keep his White House bid alive. Others faulted Right to Rise for spending so much money on telling Bush’s story and not changing tactics immediately after Donald Trump entered the race and began stoking the groundswell of anti-establishment sentiment and defined Bush — lastingly — as “low energy.”

“At a time when so many voters are anti-establishment and angry at the government, the last thing you should say in all of your campaign ads is ‘I am a former governor with a great record of governing,’” said Joe Culotta, a former Republican Party of Florida consultant who is supporting Rubio. “Don't get me wrong, I respect Gov. Bush and totally agree that he did great things in Florida. But to voters, that translates to ‘I have a lot of experience in being part of the establishment and the government that you all hate.’”

These sour feelings about Murphy’s management of Right to Rise mark a dramatic turn for a group that came out of the gate in stunning fashion, raising a record $103 million last summer and setting a breakneck pace that many, a year ago, thought couldn’t be matched.

That initial success coincided with Murphy’s re-emergence on the national political scene after he had been semiretired from politics, living in California and sitting out the 2012 presidential election. Long close to Bush, it surprised some when he was selected to lead the super PAC instead of playing a direct role inside the campaign. But Murphy quickly wooed donors and set in motion the strategy that reflected the general Republican consensus that Bush would be the easy front-runner and likely Republican nominee.

That all changed, and quickly, when Trump announced his candidacy and Bush revealed his weaknesses on the campaign trail. The whisper campaign about Right to Rise burning through money with little to show for it began shortly after that.

This isn’t the first time Murphy’s campaign spending has been questioned. After success helping to run Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first bid for governor in California, Murphy was criticized for overspending on Meg Whitman’s failed gubernatorial run. In an unusual business arrangement, Whitman made a $1 million investment in Murphy’s production company just months before he began working for her campaign. She eventually spent $144 million of her own money on the failed campaign.

Veteran California political operative Don Sipple, who brought Murphy onto the Schwarzenegger campaign, laughed when asked about Murphy’s involvement with high price-tag campaigns.

“Murphy was doing the Meg Whitman campaign so he knows how to spend money,” Sipple said, noting that Right to Rise's “return on investment is seriously elusive.”

“Whether it’s the Jeb campaign or the super PAC concept, all of that has been based on conventional wisdom and past political activities, which is not valid for 2016, it seems,” Sipple said of Murphy’s spending strategy at Right to Rise.

Right to Rise spokesman Paul Lindsay defended Murphy and said the super PAC is sticking to its playbook. “Mike is focused on the same thing everyone in our organization is focused on: supporting Jeb and getting him elected,” Lindsay wrote in an email. “Our metrics for that goal are votes and delegates.”

So far, Right to Rise has spent $58.8 million, according to ad-tracking data from SMG Delta and reported by NBC News, and doesn’t have plans to drop off anytime soon. Seeing little return on the positive ads, the super PAC shifted recently to negative contrast spots to weaken the establishment candidates sitting ahead of Bush in the polls.

But that does not explain why the group sent mailers featuring a video player showing a 15-minute documentary to Bush supporters in New Hampshire, Iowa and to a select group of donors and finance prospects over the weekend. Right to Rise is expected to also send the mailer to some Republican leaders in South Carolina.

While Right to Rise spokesman Lindsay dismissed criticism of the video mailer investment, saying the group sent 300 copies of the video mailer for just “a few thousand dollars in total,” it was part of a series of line-item expenditures that donors worry won’t help Bush.

Weeks earlier, for example, Right to Rise purchased advertising space on billboards in a few early voting states featuring a Bush quote in white letters against a red background: “Donald Trump is unhinged,” it read. Rankled by what they saw as more wasteful spending, a handful of Bush supporters in Florida began emailing around a photoshopped image of the billboard but with a different quote: “Light all the donor money on fire.” It was attributed to Murphy.

While Murphy’s critics have been vocal, the jury is out on whether some of his tactics and investments will ultimately prove successful. So far the super PAC’s spending has had almost no positive impact on Bush’s poll numbers, nationally or in the early voting states. Since Labor Day, Bush has not cracked 11 percent in any poll of New Hampshire Republican voters, according to HuffPollster’s tracker. Trump, Rubio, John Kasich, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson have all run ahead of him.

But on Wednesday, a new survey from CNN/WMUR put Bush and Rubio even at 10 percent.

Without some dramatic improvement in Bush’s position, donors say Murphy’s strategy might be doing nothing more than harming Rubio at precisely the moment the GOP could be rallying around an alternative to Trump or Cruz. Those Right to Rise donors who know Bush personally also worry about Murphy’s slash and burn tactics affecting the former governor’s legacy.

“It’s painful, because we’re watching something happen that no one envisioned happening. We all wanted it to be Jeb, but if it can’t be Jeb, at some point, doesn’t reality have to set in?” one donor said.

Lindsay defended Right to Rise’s decision to go on the offensive against Bush’s rivals. “The sequence of our strategy began with informing voters about Jeb’s successful record as governor of Florida, and it has shifted to comparing that record with those of his opponents,” he said. “We're not distracted by anonymous critics from rival campaigns who are rattled because their candidates’ records are being vetted."

In New Hampshire, where Bush’s campaign has consistently felt more optimistic about his prospects than the polling indicates it should, staffers have started to voice more pessimism about the super PAC under Murphy.

“He was supposed by the artillery and the cavalry, and instead he has just fired duds,” said a Bush staffer.

“We haven’t seen the Jeb Bush we all grew up on, a hard-core conservative. That’s not who we saw on the campaign trail for the first few months until recently,” another Republican said, summing up the mood of staff. “To the extent that wasn’t happening until recently, I have to believe it wasn’t Jeb. That rhetoric was coming from Mike Murphy.”

For its part, the Bush campaign and the super PAC have often used similar language. And one Bush aide said that it shouldn’t be surprising that the super PAC is engaging in attack ads to show a contrast with the other candidates.

Murphy has long been a polarizing figure in Republican politics. After dropping out of college to focus on politics full-time, he was involved in a slew of political campaigns. He’s advised Republicans like John McCain, Rick Lazio, Tommy Thompson and Lamar Alexander.

He was a founder of DC Navigators before starting the political consulting firm Revolution Agency.

His involvement with Bush world goes back to President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 presidential bid, in which he served as an adviser before leaving the campaign. He also served as a consultant for Jeb Bush’s successful 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial races.

Even Murphy’s friends concede that his personality can be an acquired taste.

GOP lobbyist David Carmen, a friend for more than two decades, described Murphy as being the “Bill Belichick of GOP politics,” referring to the longtime head coach of the New England Patriots.

“And what I mean by that is [Belichick] is famous for his sort of taciturn behavior and the phrase ‘Do your job’,” Carmen said. “I think Mike feels that everyone should just do their job, and he spends all night every night, all day every day, thinking about every possible contingency and formulation about what might occur in a given campaign.”

“That comes across to some people as off-putting, but that is who he is,” Carmen said. “He is a genius of the mechanics of politics. He’s always been that way.”

One major difference — Belichick has won four Super Bowls and Murphy still hasn’t claimed a presidential campaign victory.