Now there's a name we haven't heard for a while. Shoulda kept it that way.
The news has been pretty rotten of late,
so here's something to cheer you up.
Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida was blunt Monday night: If he runs for president in 2016, he will not pander to his party’s conservative base in the primaries.
Oh, Lord. We're to this point already—the ceremonial pandering of swearing that you will not pander, at least not to the
other people. Only to you, my wealthy pretties gathered here tonight!
Mr. Bush said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in Washington that Republican candidates must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general, without violating your principles.”
I suggest Mr. Bush set out to lose the primary post-haste. But wait, does this mean he is running? That we will be presented with a
third Bush for the presidency, that particular dynasty having done such a bang-up job of late that most Republican politicians are still loath to let the name escape their lips?
Mr. Bush said he would make a decision about the 2016 race “in short order” and sketched out the sort of campaign that he said Republicans must run to take back the White House. “It has to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more willing to be practical,” he said.
The last Republican president, who for censorship reasons we shall call only
Dubya, ran on a theme of
compassionate conservatism. You will recall that it was an uplifting, positive, practical message of being conservative, but saying "compassionate" a lot more often so it didn't seem like the routine of gutting the American safety net
and middle class in favor of shoveling great gobs of tax money upwards was such a bastardly thing to do. Then he was elected and we heard not one thing more about
compassion, we just heard that the result of a bizarre election in which the Supreme Court demanded Florida stop trying to determine who had really won so as to not be
divisive was, in fact, a mandate by the American people that the new president do all the gutting and the bastardly things and shortly thereafter everything went to absolute hell in multiple very dark ways that all of us would love to be able to forget, if it weren't for the new headstones and all the shops in town that are still, to this day, left with their windows boarded up and
For Rent signs attached as seemingly permanent new fixtures. But that was a while ago, and Americans drink a lot so the history of how these things came to be gets a bit fuzzy after six years or so.
So we will not have compassionate conservatism this time around. It appears this time we will have something called practical conservatism, which is indeed the same shit from the same line of cows but this time gutting the remains of the middle class and shoveling the money to America's most deserving crooked bastards will be called practical, in accordance with the long-held belief that this other Bush brother was, to use the common description, "the smart one," the one who will able to make all that stuff hum along like Enron delivering high-quality electricity to all the people of the West Coast. You know—Practical. Smart. With a Mandate that he found in his brother's old desk.
Wait—this was supposed to be a cheery post. This won't do at all. All right, here's the part to cheer your day: Jeb Bush says that if he runs for president, he won't pander to the conservative base. It didn't take Mitt Romney very along at all to toss his signature achievements aside lest someone accuse him of wanting to give the American people health insurance; as I recall, one of Jeb!'s personal selling points was that he was not nearly as malevolent to the immigrant population as the modern party requires, a stance which won't make it to the first primary debate commercial break. Also, it looks like he'll be running against Rand Paul, and Rick Perry, and possibly Mitt Romney 2.1b, and you have to admit that'll be a hell of a thing to watch.