3/25/14, "Jeb Bush is thinking about running for president. Here’s who he talks to about it." Washington Post, The Fix, Chris Cillizza
"Jeb Bush is thinking about running for president in 2016. Like, really thinking about it. He's the headliner at an event hosted by mega donor Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas on Thursday. He was actively involved in Rep. David Jolly's special election victory in Florida earlier this month."...
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Jeb Bush actively opposed David Jolly in the primary. He finally gave him a flip flop endorsement in the general election but did nothing to stop GOP sabotage of Jolly's campaign to the last minute:
3/7/14, "National GOP turns on Florida candidate," Politico, Alex Eisenstadt
"Jolly, a longtime aide to Young who left Capitol Hill in 2007 to start a lobbying career, wasn’t the Republican establishment’s first choice. In fact, GOP officials sought out three other prospects, eager to find a candidate with a higher and more appealing profile than they believed Jolly possessed.
After longtime GOP Rep. Bill Young died in October, House Speaker John Boehner called Rick Baker, a popular former mayor of St. Petersburg, and pressed him to run for the vacant seat. The Baker courtship didn’t stop there: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also pushed the former mayor to run, according to two sources. (Bush has since gotten behind Jolly, appearing in TV ads calling him “the best candidate to go to Congress.”)
After mulling it over for a few days, Baker turned them down. By that time, Jolly’s name had emerged as a possible candidate. But national Republicans went after two other possibilities — former Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri — both of whom also declined. That left Jolly to face off against state Rep. Kathleen Peters and one other candidate in the Republican primary.
As soon as the GOP primary began, problems emerged. State Sen. Jack Latvala, a powerful local powerbroker, bypassed Jolly and threw his support to Peters....
Jolly won the mid-January primary easily. But his campaign entered the general election nearly broke....
Behind the scenes, his campaign has caused grief for Republican leaders in Washington....
On at least two occasions, Jolly declined to say he would back Boehner as speaker.
After the second response, Jolly sent out a tweet clarifying that, indeed, he would back Boehner.
.
That wasn’t enough for the speaker’s allies.
“After all that was done to help Jolly, his noncommittal statements on if he supports the speaker made Boehner advisers furious,” said one Republican official close to Boehner’s operation."
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"Republicans failed to recruit their top picks, leaving Jolly to fight a bruising three-way primary."...
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A local report on election day makes no mention of Jeb Bush:
3/11/14, "David Jolly has lead in close Pinellas congressional race," Tampa Bay Times, Leary, Wiseman, Puente
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Everyone knows Jeb Bush's big issue is amnesty but Jolly was against amnesty favored by Bush and specifically campaigned on that position: "He ran an ad proclaiming that he is “in favor stronger borders. Not amnesty.”" Jolly's win is anything but a "victory" for Jeb Bush. Rep. Jolly also opposes global warming alarmism and ObamaCare both of which the Establishment is fine with.
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3/12/14, "The Overlooked Factor in the FL-13 Victory," Daniel Horowitz, Madison Project
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If Jeb Bush was "actively involved" in this election as the Washington Post says it wasn't for a flip flop so called endorsement. It was that at minimum he did nothing to stop the GOP Establishment sabotage of Jolly and his campaign:
3/12/14, "Why is NRCC wiping egg off its face?" The Hill, Rick Manning
"Oops. David Jolly won election to Congress in Florida’s special election to take the place of recently deceased Rep. Bill Young (R). Republican hearts in D.C. should be leaping for joy, because early betting in town was that this was a near-certain Democrat takeover and Jolly upset that apple cart.
Everything pointed to a victory for Democrats. They recruited a candidate with high name identification who narrowly lost a race for the governorship in a district that voted for Obama in 2012, the ideal D.C. candidate-recruitment win.
The expectations on the Republican side of the aisle to retain the seat were so low that on the Monday before the election, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) was anonymously spinning to Politico that the election was likely to be lost due to Jolly and those running his campaign on the ground.
Imagine the fear in some unknown cubicle at NRCC headquarters as Jolly calls Chairman Greg Walden (Ore.) and asks for an accounting of why the group, whose sole responsibility is to elect Republicans to the House, sought to undermine his campaign in the final day.
Today, all the D.C. “gurus” are taking credit for their brilliance in winning the race and giving short shrift to the newly elected Jolly. Jolly ran a campaign against amnesty for illegal aliens, against ObamaCare, and he refused to modify his conservative stands and move to the middle, as the political intelligentsia so often suggests.
They cannot afford to give him credit or credibility, because his messaging directly contradicted their best advice. And in the next few days, he will be sworn in.
Now, Democrats in D.C. are scrambling for cover. And when they get there, chances are they’ll find a couple of NRCC staffers hoping to avoid the blowback from their almost treasonous attempt to submarine a soon-to-be-sitting member of Congress's election campaign.
Somehow I think someone at the NRCC is going to find out the meaning of the saying “politics ain’t bean bag.”
"Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government. Contact him at rmanning@getliberty.org."
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This article notes how different David Jolly is from the GOP Establishment. "As the election of David Jolly illustrates yet again, there is a considerable difference between the grass roots — the base — of the GOP and its Establishment leaders in Washington." Jeb Bush isn't mentioned in the article but he exemplifies the GOP Establishment:
3/13/14, "David Jolly’s Next Problem: Boehner and McConnell," Jeffrey Lord, American Spectator
"So David Jolly wins the House special election in Florida this week by defeating a Democrat who pledged to fix Obamacare, not repeal it. But there’s more.
Jolly won the GOP congressional nomination in the first place by defeating State Representative Kathleen Peters in the GOP primary. And what was Peters promising? Said Peters:
“I do not think that we should take a stand and say absolutely repeal it. Not unless we have a plan and a proposal to replace it.”Peters lost, Jolly won. Democrat Alex Sink made the same pledge as Peters. Jolly won again.
And what is John Boehner’s GOP House set to do? They’re going to fix Obamacare.
Yes, you read that right. Reports Politico’s Jennifer Haberkorn (hat tip Taegan Goddard here)....
In other words, Boehner’s GOP House is set to do exactly what Jolly won promising not to do.
In a snapshot, this is exactly the GOP’s problem. Candidates run pledging to do X — then once elected they are quickly pressured by the GOP’s Washington Establishment to join the status quo and not do exactly what they pledged to do if elected. Margaret Thatcher, faced with the same problem from British Establishment Conservatives, put it this way:
“Indeed one of the reasons for our electoral failure is that people believe too many Conservatives have become socialists already…. And why should anyone support a party that seems to have the courage of no convictions?”This is why the widening gulf between the GOP Establishment and conservatives, whether one describes the latter as Tea Partiers, conservative reformers, the heirs of Ronald Reagan or groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund, Heritage Action, The Club for Growth, Freedom Works, Americans for Prosperity and the Madison Project....
As the election of David Jolly illustrates yet again, there is a considerable difference between the grass roots — the base — of the GOP and its Establishment leaders in Washington....
The other message out of that Florida special election is a shot across the bow of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Establishment GOP Republicans."...
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3/12/14, "David Jolly Proves GOP Can Win Swing Districts by Opposing Amnesty," Breitbart, Tony Lee
"As Daniel Horowitz of the Madison Project observed, the "notion that we must support amnesty to remain viable is clearly laid to waste by this victory in a Florida swing district" and "if running as a conservative on the issues, including the issue of immigration, is a pathway to victory in an Obama +4 district, imagine the results in a district Romney carried by 10, 20, or 30 points."
"But don’t expect the wizards of smart within the Republican Party establishment to ever consider that the reality of the immigration issue might be in conflict with their conventional wisdom," he pessimistically wrote. "There is too much money invested in that fallacious premise."
During the campaign, (Democrat candidate) Sink was for amnesty and even said the country needed it so people like her could hire cheap labor. ...
When Jolly was trailing in the polls by three points, the Republican establishment started to throw him under the bus the weekend before election night."...
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Global warming also became a big issue in the 2014 Fla. special election. A resident says most of the tv ads in the last 2 weeks of the campaign were about global warming. Profiteers attacked Jolly for not being a global warming alarmist. (In 2012 alone $1 billion a day was invested in the notion of "global warming.") The author doesn't mention seeing ads with Jeb Bush:
3/12/14, "Alex Sink Rides Global Warming Alarmism to Surprise Congressional Defeat in FL-13," Forbes, James Taylor
Having just moved into Florida’s U.S. House
District 13, I was shocked these past two weeks to discover how global
warming became the central issue dominating television’s political
commercials. Granted, I haven’t been watching much television, as moving
from one house to another has been nearly a full-time job.
Nevertheless, it seemed I couldn’t go 15 minutes into my limited viewing
schedule without seeing the same Sierra Club/League of Conservation Voters commercial
excoriating Jolly for being a global warming skeptic. I honestly can’t
recall seeing any other political commercials these past two weeks,
either pro-Sink or pro-Jolly. However, I must have seen the global
warming commercial at least a dozen times.
Most campaign analysts and all pre-election
polls named Sink the favorite in the race. Sink held statewide office as
Florida Chief Financial Officer from 2007-2010. In 2010, one of the
bloodiest political years for Democrats ever, Sink came within a hair of
winning Florida’s gubernatorial election. Sink had a tremendous name
recognition advantage over Jolly, a former lobbyist who nobody had even
heard of six months ago. Sink’s campaign outspent Jolly. And Sink
decided to counter anti-Obamacare sentiment by defining Jolly as a
scientifically dangerous climate change skeptic.
.
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Jolly didn’t even fight back against the constant global warming political onslaught. He never answered the Sierra Club/League of Conservation Voters attacks with a defense of his views on global warming, energy and the environment. He simply let Sink’s supporters sink their political war chest on what turned out to be a loser political strategy. Maybe Sink, despite all her advantages, was unavoidably going to suffer the political upset, anyway. Then again, maybe not.
What we do know is a well-known Democrat who had recently served in statewide office lost to a lobbyist running his first political campaign after global warming became the most visible campaign advertising issue in the weeks leading up to the election.
Interestingly enough, the Florida District 13
election occurred just as the Senate Democratic Climate Action Task
Force wrapped up an all-night session in which 30 Democratic senators
filibustered to protest the Democratic-controlled Senate’s failure to
pass a carbon tax. Democratic U.S. Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark
Pryor (D-AR), Mark Begich (D-AK) and Kay Hagan (D-NC), all of whom face
difficult reelection contests in the upcoming November elections, stayed
conspicuously away from the high-profile hijinks.
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The Washington Post adores Jeb Bush because he's guaranteed to lose-just like Romney, McCain, and Bob Dole. Jeb Bush couldn't even deliver the state of Florida to his own brother in 2000 at the height of his alleged popularity. In 2012 he blew it again, backed Connie Mack for Senate from Florida and Mack lost in a landslide.
Jeb Bush backed Connie Mack IV lost by 13 points:
Jeb Bush and Connie Mack IV
Mr. Jolly also won despite a Libertarian candidate siphoning 4.8% of the vote:
3/11/14, "Victory in Florida Bolsters Midterm Hopes for Republicans," NY Times, Lizette Alvarez, Clearwater, Florida
"Mr. Jolly won 48.5 percent of the vote and Ms. Sink received 46.6 percent. A third candidate, Lucas Overby, a Libertarian, won 4.8 percent."
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