The Cook Political Report represents the gold standard in political polling and prognosticating. When Charlie Cook or his lieutenants cite a trend, you can take it to the bank. This week one of Cook’s top experts, Amy Walters, published an analysis of Jeb Bush’s all-but-announced presidential campaign that is likely sounding alarms throughout the Republican Party’s establishment wing. The headline, written in neutral Cookspeak, says it all: “Jeb Goes from Fragile Frontrunner to Underdog.”
“With each passing day, Jeb Bush looks weaker and weaker,” Walters writes. “While he has a top notch political team and (reportedly) tons of cash, he is dropping, not, rising in the polls. For a party desperate to win back the White House, Bush is looking more and more like a risky bet.”
Walters cites recent Washington Post/ABC and CNN/ORC polls [PDF] that “paint a grim picture of Bush’s general election hopes.”
In the CNN poll, Bush loses to Hillary by the largest margin — 51 percent to 43 percent — of any Republican other than Ted Cruz. The Washington Post poll found that 55 percent said they expected Clinton would win against Bush in 2016.
Bush’s biggest problem is the record of his older brother, George W. Bush, a factor Walters describes as “toxic” to Jeb’s campaign. “A whopping 56 percent of voters said the fact that Jeb Bush is ‘the son and brother of former presidents’ makes them less likely to vote for him, “Walters writes. “The Washington Post/ABC poll found similar results, with 40 percent saying they thought Jeb would ‘mainly follow the same policies’ as his brother, and just 51 percent saying he’d come up with new policies. Meanwhile, just 24 percent thought Hillary Clinton would follow the same policies as her husband, and 66 percent thought she’d ‘come up with new policies.'”
Of course, Pres. Bill Clinton’s policies were popular and successful, while George W. Bush’s record as president was disastrous and devoid of history-making successes. He left office as the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling.
It gets worse. Jeb Bush is not only unpopular with general election voters, he’s disliked by members of his own party. “In December of 2014, Bush was at 23 percent [among Republicans],” Walters writes. “Today, he’s dropped to 13 percent. The Washington Post/ABC poll finds that he’s dropped seven points since March — from 20 percent to 13 percent. In the CNN poll, more than one-third of GOPers – and 62 percent of those who identify as Tea Party – say that they are ‘less likely’ to vote for him because he’s the brother/son of former presidents. Just 18 percent of Democrats say that they are inclined to vote against Hillary Clinton because she’s the wife of the former president.”
Jeb has other problems that have so far not blipped onto the media’s radar. In fact, if Jeb’s biggest problem is his toxic older brother, his biggest asset as he enters the race may be the national political media elite. While the men and women who cover Washington have a bottomless appetite for any and all bogus scandals about the Clintons that vast right-wing conspiracists care to lob at them — Filegate, Travelgate, Vince Foster’s suicide, Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, etc. — the Beltway Botox and bouffant crowd have repeatedly gone out of their way not vex the aristocratic Bushes.
Even now, with the 2016 campaign barely underway, the national political media establishment has already put its bias against the Clintons and for the Bushes on display.
Imagine the cable news top-of-the-hour, lead-story coverage Hillary Clinton would be getting right now if a watchdog group had filed complaints against her campaign with the Federal Election Commission. By contrast, two watchdog groups have filed complaints against Bush’s un-campaign alleging that he is delaying officially joining the race so that he can extra-legally, at best, continue to raise unlimited amounts of cash.
What’s that we hear from Beltway pundits and reporter about Jeb Bush’s alleged criminal wrongdoing? Crickets.
The media has also ignored Jeb Bush’s bona fide email scandal while pummeling Hillary Clinton for deleting emails from a private server after she left office as secretary of state. Jeb Bush used a private email server for the eight years he was governor of Florida, and according to the Wall St. Journal, a Bush aide said the emails had all been destroyed.
By any standard, Jeb’s actions are far worse than Hillary Clinton’s. What he did was a violation of state law, specifically Florida’s “sunshine laws.” She is accused of an infraction — ignoring an administration policy, the same rule broken by Colin Powell, George Bush’s former secretary of state, who has said he also deleted emails from his private account when he left office. It appears that his successor, Condoleeza Rice, also destroyed her private emails. And, of course, when Karl Rove deleted 22 million emails during the investigation the firing of U.S. attorneys for political purposes, the D.C. media yawned.
Another contrast: while Clinton deleted 50,000 emails, Bush deleted 2.5 million emails, according to right-leaning Politifact.
And then there’s Foundationgate. The media went into a frenzy over a story concocted by a VRCer claiming that the Clinton Foundation is essentially a slush fund into which the wealthy and powerful make donations in expectation of favorable action by the Clintons. A little known aspect of this story is the fact that the Clinton Foundation makes public the names of all its donors, along with amounts given.
Conversely, the Bush family foundations accept anonymous donations, according to Mother Jones:
The George W. Bush Foundation raised $361.8 million between 2010 and 2013, according to its latest tax filing. But it does not have a policy of full disclosure for its donors. According to Hannah Abney, the communications director for the George W. Bush Presidential Center, the names of the foundation’s major donors are etched into three “donor walls” in the Dallas-based Bush Center at Southern Methodist University, and the “Freedom Registry,” located at the entrance to the George W. Bush museum and library, lists donors who have contributed more than $20. No specific donation amounts are noted, and there’s a catch: Any donor who wishes to remain anonymous is not named. Moreover, the only way to see the list of nonanonymous donors is to visit the actual museum and look at the walls and the registry. The George W. Bush Foundation does not make its list available in any other form or in any other place.
In 2013, the Dallas Morning News uncovered the identities of some of Bush’s donors. Among them were the governments of two foreign countries, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, right-wing fatcats, including Sheldon Adelson — the gambling mogul who funded Newt Gingrich’s failed 2008 presidential campaign — and Rupert Murdoch, the GOP’s propaganda czar.
Mother Jones also found that the foundation set up by George H.W. Bush at Texas A&M University does not reveal its donors.
The furor over the Clinton Foundation abated because legitimate journalists had full and free access to the foundation’s donor list. After rigorously vetting the list against Clinton’s actions when she was secretary of state, reporters — including even those at the notoriously Clinton-hating New York Times — came up with nothing. No wrongdoing.
On the other hand, whether Adelson, Murdoch and other anti-democracy oligarchs are using the the Bush foundations to buy political favors from putative future-Pres. Jeb Bush will never be known.
Jeb Bush may be an increasingly weak candidate by the numbers, but he surely knows he has an ace or two up his sleeve. Like his brother, the worst president in the modern era (at least), Jeb Bush knows can always rely on political media elites to ignore his missteps and scandals — just as they did his brother’s youthful drug use and sketchy military service during the 2000 campaign and as they did during George W.’s presidency when he took the country to war based on lies, violated the international treaty banning torture that Ronald Reagan signed and crashed the world economy in a naked pursuit of economic policies intended to prop up his family’s fellow plutocrats at the expense of the middle class.
Jeb Bush knows that no matter what he does or says during his presidential campaign this same Beltway gang and their doppelgangers at the Fox channel and other GOP outlets will have his back.
