DigitalDrifter
Diamond Member
It's time to not only close the book on Jeb's campaign, but to thank the Bush family for their service. and wish them all farewell.
Rubio’s rise and the end of the Bush dynasty
Rubio’s rise and the end of the Bush dynasty
Rubio’s rise and the end of the Bush dynasty
The day after the Iowa caucuses, I watched as the Shakespearean drama underlying this year’s Republican race — a classic tale of friendship and betrayal — played out its final act on either edge of New Hampshire.
In Keene, close to the Vermont border, I joined the small group of reporters who came to hear Jeb Bush speak to a polite audience of workers at a grocery wholesaler. Bush was, as ever, reasoned and respectful, but he seemed a little frustrated as he compared his old Florida protégé to President Obama.
Marco Rubio is “gifted as a politician, an unbelievable orator,” Bush said. But “the presidency is a leadership position. It’s not a backbencher, where you argue endlessly over amendments.”
Later, I drove down to Exeter, on the seacoast, where Rubio had just arrived to a line of satellite trucks and a raucous crowd of maybe 800 people, packed so tightly into a steaming, centuries-old theater that I heard a volunteer raise questions about the sturdiness of the balcony.
Playful and sure-footed, Rubio seemed like a different guy from the halting candidate I’dwatched in Iowa just a few weeks earlier, under attack from all sides. “It is not enough to be angry,” Rubio told the crowd. “You have a right to be angry. But anger is not a plan.”
At one point, he told the story of how he had courageously decided to take on Florida’s Republican establishment and its then governor, Charlie Crist, when he ran for Senate in 2010. He left out the part about how his mentor, Jeb, had put the whole plan in motion.
New Hampshire is a fiercely unpredictable place, and anything can happen Tuesday. But it sure looks like we’re witnessing the last week of the long Bush dynasty in Republican politics — vanquished, in part, by a onetime confidant who understood where American politics was going.
This is not the way it was supposed to go down. When I talked with Rubio back in March, a few weeks before his official announcement, most analysts believed that Bush’s entry into the race had made Rubio redundant. Bush was better known, better funded and better positioned to lock down Florida’s coveted money and delegates.
Rubio’s rise and the end of the Bush dynasty