In retrospect, Jeb Bush’s decision to go with “Jeb!” (exclamation point included) as his campaign slogan turned out to be perfect metaphor … no, not even a metaphor, simply a guide to his campaign: taking something fundamentally uninteresting and repeating it with escalating emphasis and frequency until it becomes interesting. Now apparently his campaign is considering a last ditch plan to add a second exclamation point. But is that going to work? I doubt it.
Okay, that second exclamation point thing isn’t really happening. I made that up. But this Times article about Team Jeb(!)’s longshot six point plan to win the nomination includes at #4 ‘secure the endorsement of Lindsey Graham’. But is that really any more connected to reality than the extra exclamation point? I don’t think it is.
I’m sure others have used the exclamation point approach since then. But as far as I can remember the last to try was Lamar Alexander who ran as “Lamar!” in 1996. He of course went nowhere, in part I think because of comparable fatal boringness and lack of any rationale for his campaign.
