The picture tells the story. No separation. Just call them Jebya.
As bad as you may have thought this week was for Jeb Bush, it was actually worse. This is the week Jeb Bush lost the Republican presidential nomination. And it may just be the week that Marco Rubio won it. When Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked Jeb on Monday whether he would have ordered the invasion of Iraq—knowing what we know today—there's no way she thought she was about to
sink his chances of becoming the third Bush to sit in the Oval Office in 25 years.
After his initial answer didn't go so well, the next day Jeb tried to get away with claiming he misheard the question—yet he blew it again, complaining about having to answer a "hypothetical" and failing to give the right answer (which, as Paul Begala pointed out, is: "No! God no! Of course, no! Certainly not!"). It took four days before Jeb finally, finally got it, or maybe only sort of got it, given that he felt compelled to throw in that the world is "significantly safer" because his brother took out Saddam, and added that, going forward, "We need to re-engage [in Iraq], and do it in a more forceful way."
Here's why those four days are so important. The Republican clown car is more like a clown Winnebago, i.e., there are a whole lot of people on it. Don't like one? Try another. More specifically, Jeb Bush has some strengths and some weaknesses, and this fiasco (when noted foreign policy expert Chris Christie is able to smack you on Iraq, not to mention a 19-year-old college student, you know you've screwed up) reminded Republican voters just how serious those weaknesses are.
Follow below the fold for more.
Jeb was supposed to be the quintessential establishment candidate based on electability and the perception of his competence. But he can't be the candidate of the establishment if he sounds, well, incompetent. And I don't just mean incompetent in terms of his foreign policy stances, as important as those are. Jeb appeared incompetent as a candidate, someone unable to successfully run for—let alone do a good job as—president of the United States.
As Steve Benen noted, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul all were asked the same question Megyn Kelly asked Jeb, and none of them screwed it up. How could any Republican—especially the brother of the man who ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003—be anything other than 100 percent prepared for such a softball. If it weren't an easy question, would a Fox News host have asked it? Also, Jeb's initial instinct to shift blame toward Hillary Clinton makes sense only if one assumes that that's the approach every Republican should take on every issue.
For Jeb Bush, his number one priority when discussing Iraq should have been to separate himself from the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country, something he recognized when, in his most significant foreign policy address thus far, he emphasized: "I am my own man." Instead, this incident—combined with his recent declaration that, "who I listen to when I need advice on the Middle East is George W. Bush"—eviscerated that strategy of separation.
The second part of this equation is that Jeb Bush's blunder is Marco Rubio's gain, especially in the crucial primary within the primary, namely the race to be the favored candidate of the Republican establishment. As this past week began, there were only three candidates capable of winning the Republican nomination: Jeb, Rubio, and Scott Walker. Rand Paul's appeal is essentially limited to libertarians, Mike Huckabee's to Southern fundamentalists, and Ted Cruz's to Tea Party extremists. The others are either third-tier candidates with little support (although I wouldn't be shocked to see John Kasich make a move upward if he runs), or absolute nutballs, i.e., Ben Carson, whose initial level of support will prove unsustainable once people actually start paying attention.
Within the top tier, Scott Walker is "headed for trouble with the GOP Establishment," at least according to conservative pundit Byron York. Politico's James Hohmann concurred, saying that "there’s an emerging sense in the early states that Scott Walker is not ready for primetime." Thus, Marco Rubio stands as the clear establishment alternative to Jeb Bush. PPP's recent poll conducted May 7-10 shows Walker in the lead, but with Rubio (as well as Huckabee) showing "clear momentum," and Jeb slipping from 17 percent to 11 percent. In Huffington Post's Pollster aggregator, Rubio has jumped from 4 percent in December to almost 10 percent now, vaulting into the top three.
But what does Rubio actually believe? If Jeb Bush reminds Americans of his all-too-reckless brother, does the senator from Florida offer something else, something different? American Bridge 21st Century has put together a detailed primer laying out just what the Republican Party will get if they do ultimately turn to Rubio. Here's the summary:
As Marco Rubio prepares for what his campaign is billing as a “major” foreign policy speech at the Council of Foreign Relations on Wednesday, his lackluster foreign policy resume is a good reminder that Rubio’s shift to ultra-hawk has been sloppy at best. Like his vertigo-inducing swing right on immigration, Rubio has tacked to the extreme right to appease the Tea Party base that still controls the Republican Party.
Rubio likes to remind voters that he has the most foreign policy experience of any GOP presidential contender with spots on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, but those assignments haven’t translated into substantial achievements.
In the aforementioned major foreign policy speech Rubio gave this week (the guy's got good timing, give him that), he presented himself as a hawk's hawk. Christopher A. Preble, the libertarian CATO Institute's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, explained that what "differentiates" the senator from Florida from his fellow Republican candidates is "an aggressive enthusiasm for intervention abroad."
In his remarks last Wednesday, Rubio proclaimed: "The deterioration of our physical and ideological strength has led to a world far more dangerous than when President Obama entered office." Interesting. I didn't realize that "strength" was a serious foreign policy agenda, but what do I know compared to a U.S. senator who apparently has been boning up on world affairs at the world-renowned Liam Neeson Institute for International Relations.
The New York Times called Rubio's approach to foreign policy "robust and muscular." Michael Brendan Dougherty had a different take: "Rubio's foreign policy consists of babyish moralizing, a cultivated ignorance of history, and a deliberate blindness to consequences." Our own Hunter added that it consists of three planks: "(1) spend money (2) patrol the high seas and (3) Freedom Bombing."
Here's the takeaway from all this. The Republican establishment is by no means turning away from a George W. Bush-style, shoot first and don't ask questions later approach to foreign policy. They may well, however, turn away from a candidate who appears unable to talk about foreign policy without reminding voters that it was their party—and his brother—who lied and blustered our country into a war that caused tremendous damage at great cost, and whose consequences (ISIS, anyone?) continue to be felt throughout the Middle East. Instead, the GOP establishment is likely to turn to that candidate's one-time protégé—a fellow Floridian—whose foreign policy would likely be, if anything, even more destructive.