I wanted to flag a point about Jeb Bush’s response about the Iraq War. I don’t think it’s so much a gaffe as a tell that this is something like Kryptonite for Bush’s campaign.
If you watch Bush’s exchange it’s clear he’s trying desperately to nudge the question back from ‘what we know now‘ to ‘what we knew then‘. As well he should. My take on this is actually a little different from David’s. I think ‘based on what we knew then’ is a relatively easy one for Bush or other Republican candidates to answer because you have the ‘out’ of flawed WMD intelligence and the reality – for better or worse – that a majority of Americans remember being in that situation twelve years ago and agreeing with the final decision to invade Iraq. It’s hard to criticize someone saying they would have done something at the time that you did do at the time or at least supported.
‘Based on what we know now’ is a considerably dicier question. That takes into account the non-existence of any weapons of mass destruction, the dreadful story of post-invasion Iraq and the more immediate reality that ISIS, a newly empowered Iran and more all tie back in one sense or another to the destruction of the Iraqi regime and the subsequent US occupation and post-occupation insurgency. By this measure, I think the great majority of Americans would say that it was obviously not a good idea at all. Laura Ingraham seems to agree, for what that’s worth. Say what Bush said (and even more have your enemies repeat it for months) and a lot of Americans are going to say, what? What are you thinking?
This is obviously a much bigger deal for a candidate named Bush – and one who’s already said he relies on his brother for advice on dealing with the Middle East. There’s simply no good way for Jeb Bush to answer this question without seeming really out of touch with where most Americans are on this issue. Saying it was a mistake alienates a significant portion of the GOP base, reopens a weirdly public family drama that the press wouldn’t let go of for years (or until Jeb’s campaign is over) and emphasizes what a lot of voters didn’t like and want to forget about Bush family rule.
Bush is helped slightly by the fact that Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War resolution. But not much. Hillary has already bit this bullet. In her memoir she stated unequivocally that the Iraq War was a mistake and that she was wrong to support it. As a Democrat she’s much better positioned to do this, since the war was never popular with the base of her party and has grown only less so over time. And in fact Bush’s wrestling with this question, though incidental in itself, may serve as a turning point of sorts for public opinion on the entire war.
Here’s why.
As the Bush presidency recedes into the past, Republicans feel less and less ideological commitment to support the Iraq War. It’s becoming part of history and something most Republicans don’t feel on the line for in partisan terms. There is a decent number of voters who weren’t even adults when the war started. That’s shifted the ground a great deal since the 2008 campaign and even the 2012 campaign. But there are so many other foreign policy challenges and crises today that the actual decision to invade Iraq, as opposed to cleaning up the various messes that the decision created or made possible, gets fairly little attention. Only another Bush can really make the decision to invade Iraq a newly relevant question. And now, loosened up from some of its ideological moorings and seen in its totality, the Iraq War seems a lot more clearly, and to a lot more people, to have been a mistake of truly historic proportions. Indeed, a purely voluntary and self-inflicted catastrophe of staggering proportions.
It had not occurred to me that Iraq could be such a significant issue for Bush or that he couldn’t manage to find a more artful way of squaring the circle. But now I think it will and that he can’t.
