Jeb Bush’s new line appears to be I’m my own man, except when it comes to the guys I hire to tell me what to think. As Steve Holland and Philip Klein note, Jeb’s list of advisors are chock full of cronies, hangers on and appointees of his father and his brother. There’s James Baker, Paul Wolfowitz!, Tom Ridge, Mike Chertoff, Steve Hadley, Mike Hayden and more.
It’s all very similar, frankly, to how things looked in 1999 when Jeb’s brother George got ready to be President. Now, in W’s case the commonality was distinctly deceiving. His foreign policy – the penchant for Iraq Wars aside – was quite different from his father’s. And two of his father’s key foreign policy architects – the aforementioned James Baker and even more Brent Scowcroft – ended up being major critics of George W.’s foreign policy. But in terms of optics, for how it works right now when Jeb is trying to position himself, the dynamics are quite different.
George W., to a great degree, pitched his candidacy as a Bush Restoration. Not entirely, of course. He needed to show he was his own man – perhaps at a personal as much as a political level. But I remember being at the 2000 Republican convention. And the sense of restoration, both of what we mightily charitably call Republican gentility but also of the Bush family was palpable. During his speech, the late Norman Schwarzkopf actually waxed nostalgic and explicitly about how good it would be to “have a Bush in the White House again.”
That same dynamic is far, far more complicated for Jeb. Related presidents is an extremely uncommon thing. Fathers and sons was almost unprecedented (Adams 1796 and 1824 was the only earlier example). Three members of the same family in three decades is beyond unprecedented and deeply problematic. But beyond that, you have the matter of the cataclysmically disastrous Iraq War and the world shuddering 2008 economic crisis. All of this is only to state the obvious. And for evidence you have to look no further than Jeb’s big ‘my own man’ push.
That’s where the advisors thing comes in.
Normally, voters could not care less who your advisors are. The only people concerned are politicos and policy types who enter elections with strong partisan leanings. But there are exceptions. And this is one of them. In politics, nothing is more deadly than being ludicrous, being the object of derision and laughter. For better or worse, it’s more lethal than being dumb or wrong or even corrupt. And this is the sort of readily understandable fact that makes a mockery of Jeb’s claims. It is an effortless fact hook – easy to grab on to and understand – which tends to confirm what we already know: that Jeb claiming to be ‘his own man’ is silly.
