So much for Bush III's "shock & awe" fundraising blitzkrieg:
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has defined his candidacy by an unwillingness to fall in line with traditional conservative views that resonate with the base, but there is some evidence as of late that he has shifted to the right, said National Review.
In a belatedly desperate attempt to gain traction in a race that, like Hillary Clinton on the other side of the primary fence, he had expected to have already clinched by now.
At a meeting recently of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce summer conference, he used a question-and-answer session to say he would not strike a deal that raised taxes in exchange for spending cuts, even though in 2012, as the government began inching toward a shutdown, he supported that proposal when Democrats offered Republicans the bargain.
IOW, "Read my lips, no....new....taxes". Because no conservative will ever connect those particular dots. Other than all of us.
"I think he’s attempting to do two things at once: He wants to be seen as kind of the adult in the room who’s operating in shades of gray and is a real leader as opposed to Donald Trump," a top Republican strategist told National Review. "But at the same time, I think he knows that he needs to make himself more attractive to conservatives."
Jeb couldn't make himself more attractive to conservatives if he changed his surname to "Reagan" and had a "Gipper" Halloween mask welded to his chubby face. He was counting, incredibly, on his family name and his fundraising prowess to preemptively "vaporize" the rest of the GOP field and carry him to Cleveland a year from now. And after seven months of this arrogant, ignorant complacency, it's finally dawning on him that his last name is not an asset, but an anchor, and no campaign warchest of any immense size is going to be enough to overcome it.
So now, just like Mrs. Clinton, he panders to the base he's been actively disdaining, misplacedly confidence in his ability to bamboozle us into swallowing that he won't be a fake conservative like his pop and big bro, but the "real deal".
There's one thing you can say for the latter two: They had much better timing:
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's position as the director of Michael Bloomberg's Bloomberg Family Foundation — during which time the organization teamed with Planned Parenthood to fund a global reproductive health program in parts of Africa and Central America — could be cause for consternation by social conservatives, though some right-leaning pundits don't think it should be much of an issue in Bush's presidential campaign, Politico reports.
From March 2010 until stepping down in late 2014, Bush served as the director of the Bloomberg Family Foundation. In 2012, the organization announced a $50 million donation to expand a maternal health program in Tanzania and to fund advocacy grants in Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Uganda with the goal of improved access to "reproductive health services, contraception and family planning information."
"Those four countries were jointly selected by Bloomberg's philanthropy and Planned Parenthood Global, the international division of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America," according to Politico.
Sure, Jeb has since called for the congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood that had already begun, and for the defunding effort that has already been shot down as he had to know it would be. That's all in keeping with this "conservative outreach" gimmick. But as I wrote a week and a half ago:
House Bush is only "conservative" when one of them is seeking high elective office. The rest of the time they're as filthy leftwingnut as any Democrat. There's no way on Earth that Jeb couldn't have been aware of Bloomie's mission statement litany of Marxist-Alinskyist horrors. He happily marinated in that poisonous swill for five years....until he resigned in order to run for president as a "conservative".
Because he's belatedly realized that, again, like Mrs. Clinton on the other side, he really has no other choice.
And he'll enjoy a like level of success. Which is to say, slim and none.
No comments:
Post a Comment