Bush moderation bequeathed the nation with Obama leftists-Jeffrey Lord

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4/24/14, "Jeb Bush and the GOP Donor Problem," Jeffrey Lord, American Spectator, "Anti-base politics can defeat 2016 nominee"

"By December of 1990— with two years yet to run on his term — Bush was being abandoned wholesale by the GOP’s Reaganite base. Notably conservative activist Richard Viguerie took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to pen a piece titled “Bush Loses the Right Wing.”... 

By 2006 the country was in open revolt against Bush moderation, the Congress was lost, and by 2008 nominee McCain, saddled with his own quirky moderation and Bush’s unpopularity, got clobbered. Or in other words, Bush moderation bequeathed the nation with Obama leftists.
 
Jeb Bush has done nothing but embrace all of this. And were he named Jeb Blue instead of Jeb Bush he would still have exactly the same problem. This is why Jeb was booed in New Hampshire. And the fact that GOP donors are flocking to him (as per the Washington Post) only underscores the point that the gulf between those donors and the GOP base is heading the party to a certain defeat in 2016.
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Not to be left out here is Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor’s problem isn’t a scandal over a bridge, a scandal that seems to be as presented — staffers run amok without his knowledge. Christie’s problem is succinctly captured in his own words. These words:

I’m not in this business to have an academic conversation. I am not in this business to win the argument. I am in this business to win elections. If we want to just have arguments and stand for nothing, we could just form a university.

No. This is precisely wrong. In fact, it is exactly this view that results in…losing presidential elections. This is the thinking that made George H.W. Bush a one-term president, lost George W. Bush the popular vote and almost lost him re-election. Not to mention that it defeated Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney and…yes, Nixon in 1960, Thomas E. Dewey twice, and so on. (Nixon famously began his first debate with JFK by saying, “The things that Senator Kennedy has said many of us can agree with.” ) 

Just yesterday the Washington Post ran this story on Bob Dole, writing this of the 90-year old moderate’s “thank you” tour of Kansas, reporting it this way:

There are only two possible candidates he mentioned favorably on the first day of his tour — former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who he thinks could help win more Hispanic votes; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, of whom he said, “I don’t think he knew what happened on the bridge.”… “I was one of the top supporters of President Reagan and had a pretty conservative record when I was in the Senate,” Dole said in the phone interview. “But he [Cruz] didn’t know any of that. He was just making a speech.” Asked what he would tell the young senator if Cruz came to see him, Dole said, “I’d tell him before he criticizes anyone or anything in the party, he ought to look at it first and get the facts.”

Senator Dole, a serious American hero who lost the use of his right arm in World War II, was, alas, never a Reaganite. His revision here on his Kansas thank-you tour leaves out the fact that it was he who persuaded President Reagan to raise excise taxes in return for a liberal promise of spending cuts — a promise that never came to pass. Dole repeatedly attacked Reaganomics, with Reagan biographer Steven Hayward noting that “Dole’s view was identical to Jimmy Carter’s.” Hayward notes that Dole “laid repeated roadblocks in the path of Reagan’s economic policy.” All true. And it caught up to Dole when he became the Establishment’s GOP nominee — and lost. 

The GOP base isn’t in the business of winning elections that then lose the country....

This is always the task. Not just to win an election — but to move the country forward once the election is won. ...
  
The hard political fact of life inside the GOP is that the base sees Establishment Republicans, as exemplified in that Post story about donors pushing for Jeb Bush, not as the solution but rather as part of the problem. They see a GOP consultant class whose main aim is making money regardless of whom they elect — contributing either way to exacerbating America’s Big Government addiction. An addiction that they believe is literally bankrupting the country....

Doubtless this accounts for the Outside-the-Beltway appeal of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Utah’s Senator Mike Lee, Alaska’s former governor Sarah Palin, and others. They are correctly seen as outsiders to the D.C. culture, people who really would shake up the town. The mention of their names brings cheers, not boos.
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None are dependent on the culture. Indeed, the recent New York Times article headlined “Jeb Bush’s Rush to Make Money May Be Hurdle” illustrates precisely what Bush symbolizes. Whether involved with the collapsing Lehman Brothers Wall Street firm or sitting on the board of the starkly pro-Obamacare Tenet Health Care, a giant hospital owner — and Bush is supposed to be opposed — Bush’s choices consistently reflect a devotion to the culture of who one knows as opposed to the idea of a principle-driven government. His backers love to tout the fact that Bush, who like his father is the nice-guy’s nice guy, is fluent in Spanish. Missing the point entirely that if one is saying the wrong things in two languages the perception problem becomes worse, not better. Advocating Common Core and its increasing federalization of education in Spanish is no better than advocating Common Core in English....
 
Which is why there was no Dole, McCain, or Romney presidency. And why Bush 41 was defeated after one term, and Bush 43 had such a dicey entrance into the White House, a hard sell for re-election, and a departure with poll numbers so dismal they helped sink his would-be successor McCain — who, following the same moderate trail — had already gone a long way to welding his own political anchor that ultimately sank him.

On Tuesday a GOP Tea Party candidate won 46 percent of the vote in that multi-candidate Florida GOP primary. Said his Tea Party strategist of candidate Curt Clawson’s victory: “Curt’s success sends a clear message to candidates across the country: you win elections by campaigning in bold colors, not pale pastels, as President Reagan once famously said." Bold colors or pale pastels.

It really isn’t difficult to grasp....As long as GOP donors are selling fish that the base of the GOP knows they can never eat, then the string of GOP losses will get longer in 2016.
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And deservedly so."

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Comment: In 2000 Jeb Bush couldn't even deliver a clear popular vote from the state of Florida to his brother George at the height of Jeb's supposed popularity. 

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