26 February 2016

The fall of the House of Bush

It was a pitiful end to a would-be dynasty.  Jeb! was supposed to be this cycle's Romney -- the safe, sane option backed by the big money and the "right" people, who would glide to the Republican nomination more or less by default as the various nutballs imploded.  But this time the base demanded a nutball, and would settle for nothing less than The Donald.  Despite Jeb!'s Presidential demeanor.....


.....and the excitement evident at his campaign events.....


.....he just never got any traction in the polls.  Tens of millions in ad spending failed to win him any support or even to take down the upstart Rubio, something Chris Christie accomplished with a few sentences that instantly made "the Rubot" an unshakable meme.

In fairness, dynasties have never lasted long in the US.  Think how large the Kennedys once loomed in our politics -- but you don't hear much about them now.  And Jeb! chose to enter the Republican arena just as a full-blown pitchforks-and-torches peasant uprising was under way, complete with its ranting, glowering, oddly-orange Marat.  In the end he was just one more disconsolate and bewildered aristocrat hauled off by the tumbrels of dismal polling.

I picture his campaign as a hive of activity all going for naught because of failure to adapt to circumstances -- an army of workers and consultants frantically shoveling huge piles of money into toilets, while in back the leaders hunched around their plans, baffled at the Floridian upstart and especially the bloviating billionaire orangutan who had stolen the crown prince's rightful day in the sun, but gamely struggling on with more and more of the same old ads and clichés which, surely, would restore the divinely-appointed order.

But it's over now.  There's some talk of a further generation of Bushes being groomed from shrubhood for future Presidential runs, but it won't happen.  It's impossible to tell what the Republican party's future will look like in the wake of The Donald, or even whether it has one.  But nobody is going to believe that a Bush revival is the answer.  The dynasty is done.

Please clap.

8 Comments:

Blogger okjimm said...

well, he did have a decent haircut.

26 February, 2016 07:31  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Think how large the Kennedys once loomed in our politics -- but you don't hear much about them now."
Two were assassinated and one was in congress for 40 years. Hardly an example that their ideas merely died off.

26 February, 2016 08:54  
Blogger Shaw Kenawe said...



"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.' "


Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap!

26 February, 2016 11:01  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

Okjimm: Compared to Trump, yes.

Anon: The ideas didn't die off, but the dynasty faded. Chappaquiddick Ted had a long period of prominence, and no doubt plenty of Kennedys survived him, but none has carried on the family's political prominence.

Shaw: Indeed, Jeb will always wonder what might have been if The Donald hadn't barged in.

26 February, 2016 17:10  
Blogger Les Carpenter said...

Dynasty has always been un-American. And so it should be.

Just imagine a Trump dynasty.

27 February, 2016 19:00  
Anonymous Zosimus the Heathen said...

Just out of curiosity, what was the first Bush, George H.W., like as a president? His legacy seems to have been largely overshadowed by that of his son.

29 February, 2016 04:03  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

RN: President Ivanka? The mind reels.

Zosimus: The first Bush Presidency happened at a time when I wasn't paying a lot of attention to politics. By the standards of today's Republicans he was a moderate, but he doesn't seem to have made a strong impression on the country -- basically just an interregnum between two political giants.

29 February, 2016 04:50  
Anonymous Zosimus the Heathen said...

Re Bush the First's political moderateness and modest legacy, yeah, I figured that might have been the case. About the only thing I really remember him for myself is Operation Desert Storm (though admittedly it's a long time since he was in office). It also struck me that he's the only single-term president the US has had since Reagan's election, way back in 1980.

29 February, 2016 05:26  

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