points for chutzpah pic.twitter.com/LOuCkHkT8f
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 5, 2016
The man deserves to be publicly humiliated, for vicious lies like this as well as his general ineptitude. And he is very inept — only Jeb could manage to get crosswise of the NRA bragging about what kind of award “Moses” actually presented to him…
Jeb, at New Hampshire town hall, told his staff no need for a microphone, the room and crowd are really small. Ouch.
— Ginger Gibson (@GingerGibson) January 5, 2016
Mr. Pierce, in Esquire, “Searching for the Ghost of Jeb(!)’s Campaign in New Hampshire”:
… Of all the candidates in this election, Jeb (!) is the most poignant figure of all. He had the money and he had the establishment credentials and he had the sharp people to run his campaign for him, and they were supposed to have been sharp enough even to save him from the damage to the family brand wrought by his older brother during the eight years of the Avignon Presidency. What he did not reckon with was being made into a figure of ridicule by a vulgar talking yam and his campaign without conscience. Jeb (!) is the only Republican that He, Trump mentions by name at his rallies, and only then as a punchline. Jeb (!) was ready for anything but that. He has been the perfect grist for what has become the very weird political culture of the party to which his family has been so central for almost three decades…
So there he is, a dark suit against a brick wall, slumping a bit, and trying to demonstrate the kind of energy that He, Trump keeps saying Jeb (!) doesn’t have. His pitch is conventional Republican conservatism, weighted heavily toward handing most of the federal regulatory authority—and a lot of the federal social safety net—back to the states. It is not so much that Jeb (!) is low energy. It is that he can’t seem to energize anyone else. Nothing flows out from him. There are two ways you can go with this. You can offer yourself as a living embodiment of your audience’s hopes and dreams, or its anger and fears. He, Trump has mastered that. Or you can offer yourself as a contrarian who tells the audience uncomfortable truths about itself and hope that, once engaged that way, the audience will see you as a person of conviction and grudgingly give you the benefit of its doubts. Democratic candidates love to do this, often to their detriment, and this time, for a while, Chris Christie seemed to be toying with the notion, but Big Chicken has gone back to his default setting as the guy at the end of the bar that everyone avoids. Jeb (!) is incapable of doing either one. He’s just…there, a dark suit against a brick wall. The divide between Jeb (!) and one of those cardboard cut-outs of celebrities that people pose with in Times Square is not that wide…
Of course, Politico really admires the way the dumb putz is still out there pitching…
Jeb Bush on Tuesday recounted his private conversation last year with Mitt Romney, reiterating that he has a plan to win the Republican nomination and shrugging off the suggestion that his older brother’s legacy has been an albatross…
“Look, Mitt Romney’s a great guy, and I do consider him a friend, and in that private conversation, we talked about the campaign ‘cause he was thinking about running and I went out to see him. I wanted him to know that I was all in and had a plan to win this, and I still do,” he remarked. “But my brother — if you did the polling and actually looked at it, he’s probably the most popular president amongst Republicans in this country.”…
Appearing on “Fox and Friends” earlier in the morning, Bush declined to get specific as to how he thought he would finish among New Hampshire primary voters.
“Better than expected,” he said during an interview. “Better than expected. You tell me what the expectations are.”
“Top three?” co-host Steve Doocy asked. “Better than expected. I don’t know,” Bush said, before touting his campaign’s ground game in the early states, including New Hampshire. The remarks contrast with Bush’s declaration that he would win the state in November.
“I honestly believe I’m going to win New Hampshire,” he told WMUR at the time.
The next president must cut taxes for people who lost money on Right to Rise. Only fair. https://t.co/P7AsDdxTOF
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 5, 2016
Open Thread: Savoring the Ongoing Jeb! DeflationPost + Comments (60)