Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard documents his time traveling with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s campaign entourage, and Ferguson adds to his firsthand observations a political profile of the latest Bush pursuing the White House.
Other Republicans have more substantial reasons to oppose him, or think they do, especially among the self-consciously conservative activists of the party. Bush’s enthusiasm for the Common Core educational standards and his advocacy of leniency for illegal immigrants apparently mark him as a “moderate,” a designation the political press has happily taken up.
At the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, in suburban Washington, D.C., the mention of Bush’s name produced a round of boos louder even than the catcalls that rained down after a mention of Hillary Clinton. (His reception brightened considerably when he appeared in person.) The radio talk show host Laura Ingraham had the ingenuity to combine the two conservative pariahs into a single candidate she called Clush: “We could dispense with this whole nomination process altogether—why don’t we call it quits and Jeb and Hillary can run on the same ticket?”
To understand the strangeness of the position that Jeb Bush finds himself in, it helps to look at his record as a practicing politician—a governor. When he left office in 2007, the verdict on his tenure was unanimous among Republicans, “moderates” and right-wingers alike. Writing in this magazine at the time, Fred Barnes summed it up: After two terms in office, Bush was not only the best governor in America but also the most conservative. Moreover, Republicans assumed that he was the former because he was the latter: His success was directly attributable to his ideology. That he should now be condemned as a moderate is a new and unexpected lesson in the education of Jeb Bush.
