8/19/15, "Donald Trump and Jeb Bush Duel at Competing Events in New Hampshire," Wall St. Journal, Heather Haddon and Beth Reinhard, 9:38pm
"Coinciding appearances miles apart offer a split-screen perspective on the volatile Republican presidential contest."
"The “Jeb! 2016” crew arrived at the local veterans’ hall 6½ hours early. Volunteers and aides for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign placed 128 folding chairs in neat rows, hung five red-white-and-blue wall buntings, and displayed three American flags....
With an hour and a half to go before the town hall, no actual voters had arrived yet.
Nineteen miles away at a high school in Derry, more than 100 people were already waiting in line to see Mr. Bush’s Republican primary rival, Donald Trump. Some came from Massachusetts. Two teenagers waved masks of Mr. Trump’s face. Fifteen hundred people had registered to attend the event—exceeding the auditorium capacity at Pinkerton Academy, a campaign staffer said................
A few minutes before the 6:30 p.m. start time, the 128 chairs were filled at Mr. Bush’s town hall. More than 1,000 people were inside Mr. Trump’s event, with another 1,000 or more watching remotely.
The coinciding campaign events offered a uniquely split-screen perspective on the sprawling, volatile Republican primary contest. Mr. Bush, a former two-term governor of Florida, kin to two American presidents and policy wonk, is favored by many in the GOP establishment, but hasn’t ignited the conservative grass roots.
Mr. Trump, a blustery reality-television star who has never held public office, is openly mocked by GOP leaders and mobbed by voters wherever he goes.
During a news conference before the town hall, Mr. Trump declined to speculate whether he was getting under Mr. Bush’s skin when asked about the dueling town halls. Then, he tore into his rival, saying that Mr. Bush was wrong to support Common Core education standards, that his brother’s decision to invade Iraq while president was awful, and that Mr. Bush’s statement that undocumented immigrants who come to the U.S. for a better life are doing so as “an act of love” was ridiculous. “I don’t see how he’s electable,” Mr. Trump added.
Mr. Bush, for his part, offered his strongest critique of Mr. Trump to date, accusing him of supporting an “un-American” tax on assets and a single-payer health-care system. “When people look at his record, it is not a conservative record, even on immigration,” he said. “Look, the language is pretty vitriolic for sure, but hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to implement his plans is not a conservative plan.” Roaming the room, Mr. Bush declared: “We will never win appealing to people’s anger every day.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to schedule a town hall at the exact same time as Mr. Bush could have been dismissed as a coincidence—if not for his own admission. “Because Bush draws so poorly, I figured it would be a good time to draw a crowd. Something like that,” Mr. Trump told a Wall Street Journal reporter Monday. And it provided just the latest illustration of how Mr. Trump is tossing out the traditional primary playbook and trying to knock his more politically experienced rivals off their games.
Mr. Bush wasn’t the only candidate crowded by Mr. Trump. About half a dozen Republican contenders, including Mr. Bush, attended an education summit in Londonderry on Wednesday before fanning out across the state.
The competition for voters Wednesday evening was stiff, with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker attending a house party 2 miles from Mr. Trump’s town hall, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hosting a town-hall meeting in New Boston....
Mr. Trump arrived about an hour late for Wednesday’s event and spoke for most of the 45-minute allotted time, taking only seven questions from the crowd that often interrupted his remarks with cheers. Mr. Trump repeated his call to build a permanent wall on the Mexican border, and joked it might be named the “Trump wall.”
“If they call it the Trump wall it has to be beautiful,” he said.
Asked about religion, Mr. Trump decried that the word Christmas has gone out of fashion, and demurred when asked when his next policy papers will be released. He promised to return to New Hampshire after a stop in Alabama on Friday, where he said a local convention center wasn’t big enough to accommodate those who wanted to attend his event.
Some voters said they preferred Mr. Trump because of his combative approach. “There was nothing to really get inspired about,” high-school teacher James Donohue said of Mr. Bush’s recent debate performance....
Mr. Trump came out with an immigration plan Sunday that calls for a permanent wall across the Mexican border, limited legal immigration, and an end to the constitutional right granting citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants.
For some, that hard-line policy is a draw. “They’ve been smuggling themselves across the border so they could have their child in the states so they could be a citizen,” said John Charron, a registered independent. “That’s not right.”
Mr. Bush favors legal status for illegal immigrants living in the U.S. and faults Mr. Trump’s plan for being too costly, unrealistic and potentially tearing families apart.
“Mr. Trump can say that he’s for this because people are frustrated that it’s abused. But we ought to fix the problem rather than take away rights that are constitutionally endowed,” Mr. Bush said in an interview with CBS News on Tuesday."...
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"Supporters of Donald Trump clamored to take photos of him as he left a town hall meeting in Derry, N.H., on Wednesday." Bedford, Boston Globe Staff, 8/19/15
More on Trump in New Hampshire:
8/19/15, "Trump: They Need Larger Venues For My Town Halls While Jeb Has "A Very Small Crowd," "They're Sleeping"," Real Clear Politics
"At a rowdy town hall on Wednesday night in Derry, New Hampshire held by Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate took a jab at his fellow presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, who happened to be holding a town hall at the same exact time.
Trump talked about how he has to continually change venues due to the amount of people he draws while Jeb "has a very small crowd" that is "sleeping."
"I'm going to be in Alabama, and there was going to be 500 people, and the room held about 1,000, and they heard that we were there. And within about two minutes, that room wasn't big enough. So they went to a room that held 2,000 people, and they heard that wasn't big enough. And now they went to the convention center, and they heard that wasn't big enough. They're going to end up being 30 to 40,000 people in Alabama."
"Right down the road, we have Jeb," Trump said. "Very small crowd. We have 2,500."
Trump boasted he had a live audience of 2,500 and several overflow rooms.
"We have 2,500," Trump said to applause. "There are other rooms, the overflow rooms all over this building, they have closed circuit television. There are people outside with speakers.""...
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Jeb always has Wall St. Journal and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch in his corner:
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12/1/14, Wall St. Journal and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch sitting next to his pathetic guy Jeb Bush at a yearly WSJ CEO dinner. Valerie Jarrett also pictured.
Source: 12/1/2014, "Valerie Jarrett, Rupert Murdoch, and Jeb Bush tonight at
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8/21/15, "However it ends, Trump’s surge is historic," Boston Globe, James Pindell
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