Zombie Candidate: Establishment Declares Jeb Dead Man Walking

The exclamation point is gone.

Just months ago, the entire establishment wing of the Republican Party was busily insisting that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush would be the Republican 2016 nominee. But now Jeb! has turned to Jeb? as establishment icons like Peggy Noonan drive a stake through the heart of the Bush campaign. On Friday, Noonan – who has never met an establishment politician she did not adore – wrote a takedown of Bush so brutal that it should finish his campaign, Mortal Kombat-style.

“He has not succeeded this year, and there is no particular reason to believe he will. Yes, he still has money, but what has money got him so far?” Noonan asks. She continues:

Jeb just isn’t very good at this. He’s not good at the merry aggression of national politics. He never had an obvious broad base within the party. He seemed to understand the challenge of his name in the abstract but not have a plan to deal with it. It was said of Scott Walker that the great question was whether he had the heft and ability to go national. The same should have been asked of Jeb. He had never been a national candidate, only a governor. Reporters thought he was national because he was part of a national family. He was playing from an old playbook—he means to show people his heart, hopes to run joyously. But it’s 2015, we’re in crisis; they don’t care about your heart and joy, they care about your brains, guts and toughness. The expectations he faced were unrealistically high. He was painted as the front-runner….I speak of his candidacy in the past tense, which is rude though I don’t mean it rudely. It’s just hard to see how this can work. By hard I mean, for me, impossible.

To be fair, Noonan has been critical of Bush’s candidacy for years. Back in April 2014, Noonan wrote of Bush, “You can’t run ambivalently.” She said in February that she didn’t see Bush as the frontrunner: “I don’t see it. In fact I think he’s making a poor impression.”

Jeb just isn’t very good at this. He’s not good at the merry aggression of national politics.

-Peggy Noonan

The same cannot be said for establishment droolcup holder David Frum, who wrote of Bush back in February, “In this latest scion of the Bush family, of all unlikely persons, the GOP may have found its own candidate for the age of fluidity represented—and accelerated—by the presidency of Barack Obama.”

No longer. He’s off the bandwagon. Today, Frum calls him “chronically unstrategic.” He says Bush “does not improvise because he dreads confrontation,” and adds, “When Bush fails, he discourages easily,” and “When discouraged, Bush – although a physically big man – psychically shrinks into his own feeling of hurt and rejection.”

Frum and Noonan want to write Bush’s political eulogy, but the fact is that Bush’s incompetence isn’t what did him in: the grassroots did. From the beginning, grassroots conservatives ruled Bush out as a potential candidate; they weren’t going to have another Mitt Romney Inevitable Nominee™ crammed down on them. The reason Marco Rubio’s candidacy continues to be viable is that he doesn’t alienate grassroots conservatives in the way Bush did.

Bush was finished the moment he announced. Stopping him became a conservative agenda item, not merely an area of passive opposition. So now, we’ll hear that Bush didn’t go down to failure because of his scorn for conservatism, or because of his pandering to the left, or because of his connections with the elite donors who think they control the future of the Republican Party. It’s just because he wasn’t enthusiastic, or joyous, or something.

The obvious explanation must be overlooked. Otherwise, the establishment might have to face up to the fact that they are losing control of the direction of the Party they have dominated for so long.