A liberal at the Politico has noted that Hillary Clinton is desperate to have Jeb Bush win the GOP nomination for president because she thinks he’d be the easiest Republican to beat in 2016. Hillary thinks that Jeb can never win election to the White House. And most conservatives agree with her.
Many feel that if Jeb wins the nomination, millions of voters who consider themselves conservative will stay home and so will millions of moderates who don’t want another disastrous Bush in the White House. Hence, Hillary will run away with it with her massive turn out in the liberal big cities. Hillary see it this way, too.
There is an obvious subtext to the panicked effort to purge the GOP of Donald Trump: to allow the party’s true hero to emerge to vanquish Hillary Clinton and restore peace and justice throughout the land. To most GOP elites, of course, the savior is Jeb Bush, complete with the Clark Kent glasses and aw-shucks good guy demeanor. The Chamber of Commerce crowd is so convinced that Jeb is the man that it (so far) has placed a bet of more than $100 million on that proposition.
There’s just one problem—the Clintons want Jeb Bush to be the GOP nominee, too.
It was Trump himself who picked up on this fact when Hillary Clinton singled out Bush for criticism over his remark that “I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” Bush later said he “misspoke.” (This is supposed to be the safe, gaffe-free candidate, right?) By going after Jeb directly, and far from the first time, the Clintons want to “elevate” him, Trump charged, because they know they can beat him.Here’s something you don’t hear, well, ever, in Washington: Donald Trump is right.
Regardless of whether Clinton survives her primary battle with a growing list of potential foes—that before long may include Joe Biden, blast-from-the-past Al Gore and heck, at this rate, maybe even Michael Dukakis—Republicans ought to think hard about the reasons why Bush might be the easiest of the serious GOP contenders for the Clintons to beat. And it’s not just because they’ve done it before.
Do you think Jeb has any chance at all in a general election?