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Ruth: The long fall for Jeb Bush and the rise of Donald Trump

 
Jeb Bush suspends his campaign after a poor showing in South Carolina.
Jeb Bush suspends his campaign after a poor showing in South Carolina.
Published Feb. 24, 2016

By now Jeb Bush's political corpse has been picked over. How did the hopes of a family dynasty end with a forlorn candidate looking like the Willy Loman of the stump? What would we call this comedy of heirs? Death of a Scion?

We know this much. Hard as it may be to fathom, Bush proved it is possible to blow through $130 million with less to show for it than Sisyphus. No small feat.

The former Florida governor's failure to capture even a spark of enthusiasm has been attributed to the candidate's hapless campaign style, his struggle to address his brother George W. Bush's monumental Iraq War blunder and his dithering reaction to personal insults flung in his direction by Donald Trump.

While Bush was selling "joy in his heart," voters were buying mouth-foaming jingoism. In the immortal words of the candidate himself: Ruh-roh!

Pick a reason — any reason — for why Bush was unable to light a fire under his candidacy and you're probably right. When you fall this far, there's plenty of noise to go around.

Then there is this. It's entirely possible Bush woke up after the coup de grace was administered to his campaign in South Carolina and said to himself: "Oh my goodness gracious, I was Crist-O-mized!"

The big lug finally knows how his successor, former Gov. Charlie Crist, must have felt to go from the golden boy of the Republican Party to the liberal Quisling of the GOP.

With apologies to the Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger, being tarred as a disloyal Republican had to feel like a "hot kiss on the end of a wet fist." After all, Bush has his conservative bona fides as a card-carrying Reagan-loving, tax-cutting, evildoer-fighting champion of the right. But not quite right enough.

Crist's apostasy was accepting approximately $12 billion in federal stimulus money during the Great Recession and physically embracing President Barack Obama during a visit to Florida to promote the program. Egad! And for that — for accepting federal money to save Florida jobs and thanking the guy who just gave you $12 billion (oh, the treachery of it all!) — Crist was exiled into the Republican political wilderness.

Today, Crist is a Democrat running for Congress to succeed Pinellas County Republican Rep. David Jolly. Bush probably has a tee time lined up in Coral Gables.

Bush got sideways with the Republican parallel universe for his embrace of Common Core education standards and for having the unmitigated gall to suggest there should be a path to legal status for illegal immigrants residing in the United States. And for that — for arguing American children should be able to compete academically with the rest of the world and committing the unpardonable sin of favoring compassionate immigration reform — Bush was Crist-O-mized and then gone.

Recently, Republican fundraiser Mel Sembler, in bemoaning the collapse of the Bush campaign, told the Tampa Bay Times' Adam C. Smith: "I don't understand our country anymore."

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It had to be a rude awakening for him to look at the remaining GOP presidential frontrunners in Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio and see J.R. Ewing, the Iago of the Rio Grande and a shadow who is afraid of his own shadow. That's not a choice. It's a death throe.

There was some good news for the mainstream Republican checkbooks this week. An "establishment" candidate emerged firmly in the "we can do business" wing of the party: a darling of Wall Street who is better connected than Oprah Winfrey.

Hillary Clinton — Ronald Reagan in a pantsuit?

Ah, you laugh, you smirk, you howl into the night. Mel Sembler's not laughing.

Sembler paused when Smith asked him if he might consider voting for the Democratic frontrunner, before noting: "I don't think I could vote for Hillary, but I'd have to give serious thought to that one."

And that is what a canary in the Electoral College looks like.