First a clarification, I call him JEB! because his name is John Ellis Bush, and he goes by Jeb normally, however since it is an acronym I capitalize it and use the exclamation point from his campaign ads because I hate him and do not respect him, even to the point of not using his name properly.
JEB! Was a shitty Florida governor who made life measurably worse for millions of people with his random cronyism and horrible policies. He killed high speed rail in the state, seemingly out of spite, he is responsible for the entire ordeal with Terry Schiavo way back when, and his policies killed tons of school funding, just to name a few problems.
On paper he is the perfect GOP candidate, full on conservative views except for his comparatively lenient stance on illegal immigration, speaks Spanish, is a Bush. If anyone was reading the GOP 2012 autopsy of the campaign they couldn't have done better than to pick John Ellis Bush. And he started out promisingly enough, a six month exploratory phase allowed him to skirt assorted campaign finance and Super-PAC collusion laws to start with an incredibly massive war chest of donations by the time he formally announced, and it was pretty clear that the party leaders wanted him. 2016 was supposed to be JEB! Vs Hillary Clinton and the only other candidate who mattered was Marco Rubio, who everyone assumed was running more or less to build up name recognition for his "real" run eight years down the line.
So what happened? How did the conservative savior fuck things up so royally?
Basically it turns out that of the Bush siblings, W was the smart one, reflect on that. Out of the gate he stumbled on the most obvious question possible "Knowing what we know now, would you still have gone into Iraq?" He's a Bush, the Iraq War is the most visible legacy of his brothers tenure as president, JEB! spent six months in an exploratory phase before announcing his campaign, there is no excuse to not have an answer to this question, yet over the course of two days he had three different positions, each of them divergent from the last.
He proved to be an entirely uninspiring speaker, literally asking an audience at one point to "please clap" and once the debates started showed no ability to change that, his seeming weakness appeared to attract Donald Trump, who managed to control the narrative that JEB! is low energy, an assertion that ended up looking pretty true as his attempts to counterattack looked like random flailing and famously during the first debate, he actually gave a low five to Trump himself not long after Trump directly insulted Bush's wife.
The campaign attempted a rebranding as things began to spiral out of hand, going from the simple tagline of "Jeb!"(the exclamation point connotes excitement) which he had used for over twenty years, to "Jeb can fix it!" which wasn't fooling anyone and seemed like a line focus grouped to connote desperation.
JEB! was not the only candidate to be unprepared for Trump, I think the campaign season started out with at least a few of the crowd trying to follow the suggestions given in the 2012 campaign autopsy but their hearts were obviously not in it, Trump however had not read that autopsy, and indeed may not read anything ever, while the recommendations were designed to appeal during the general election, he didn't give a shit about that, he wanted to win in the short term and intentionally or not, he did so by galvanizing the racists in the party and once the rest of the field figured it out and followed suit then any chance at seeming moderate had gone out the window.
JEB! To his credit I guess was unwilling to descend to Trump's level in that regard, possibly due to his personal views, possibly because those ideas are poison in the general election as we are seeing, but he failed to give the insane part of the base any reason to support him and his utter lack of competence in every other area meant that the relatively even keeled crowd didn't have a reason to unite behind him.
Mind you, it is anyone's guess as to how much of the even keeled crowd is left in the Republican party at this time, by guess is most of them are Democrats now and those who are left are basically just there because they have been trained to hate the Clintons for the last twenty odd years.
The point is, JEB! never got a base, and his campaign made some questionable decisions, such as sending out a preprogrammed tablet to hundreds of thousands of voters in Texas, the only thing it could be used for was to watch a fifteen minute documentary about JEB! and then, if the user desired, to watch it again. I want one of these by the way, Christmas is coming soon, hint hint.
JEB! suspended his campaign after the North Carolina primaries, in which he came in third I think. So much money and effort and he never even put up a good fight, losing to both Rubio and Cruz in addition to Trump in a few contests.
His inept showing probably put the nail in the coffin of the Bush's being a political dynasty forever more, for which we can thank Donald Trump I guess.
You know, there is a theory that Trump is only running because Barack Obama took the piss out of him at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2012, if that is true, Obama is singlehandedly responsible for the ignominious demise of a political dynasty as well as the death of the Republican party, not the worst legacy in the world, and JEB! becomes only a footnote. And since he is unlikely do meet a terribly painful and degrading end in which he realizes the monster he is, that will have to suffice.
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