Just weeks ago, a confrontation between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio at the third Republican debate marked a critical turning point in the trajectories of the two former Florida allies and their presidential campaigns.
It not only underscored the perils of Bush, the state’s former governor, trying to attack Rubio, one of its senators, but also left many political observers baffled by the Bush campaign’s tactics and decision to target his former protege.
But allies of the former Florida governor showed no signs of de-escalation going into the next Republican presidential debate Tuesday night. Only this time, Rubio’s team is more than willing to hit back.
The Rubio campaign released a video on Tuesday morning recounting the many times Bush praised the young senator as he rose through the political ranks – first in Florida and then nationally.
“I’m a huge Marco fan,” Bush says in one clip.
“He’s probably the most articulate conservative on the scene today,” he adds in another. “And I look forward to him being a good president.”
The video sought to remind the public of just how big an advocate Bush once was before he took to doling out what Rubio’s campaign dubbed as “phony attacks”.
The release of the video was provoked by a report in the New York Times late Monday, which detailed plans by the pro-Bush Super Pac Right to Rise to unleash as much as $20m against Rubio’s candidacy. The article also specifically telegraphed one potential line of attack – Rubio’s hardline position on abortion – that Bush surrogates would wield against the rising senator.
In the first Republican presidential debate, Rubio said he had never advocated in favor of abortion exceptions for rape and incest. While Rubio’s position is in step with social conservatives, several strategists suggested Bush allies might be looking to reach donors with a message that could cast him as too extreme to defeat Hillary Clinton in a general election.
Rubio’s campaign, which has until now declined to respond publicly to the jabs of Bush or any other Republican opponent, wasted no time responding on Twitter.
Marco Rubio “is proudly pro-life”, tweeted Jonathan Slemrod, the senator’s policy director.
Todd Harris, a top adviser to the campaign, shared a link to a Politico story from 2012 about Bush’s attempts to get then Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to choose Rubio as his running mate.
“The former Florida governor is making a big public and private push for Rubio to become the Republican vice-presidential nominee, personally lobbying Mitt Romney on his behalf and speaking to the media about it,” the article stated.
Campaigns and Super Pacs are legally barred from coordinating, and Bush’s campaign did not wade into the back-and-forth prompted by Right to Rise. In an interview with the Huffington Post last week that was published on Tuesday, Bush declined to go after Rubio’s stance on abortion and chose simply to highlight his own position.
It’s unclear if Bush will target the senator on the debate stage – the last time he tried the results were, by all accounts, brutal.
After weeks of public telegraphing, Bush failed to execute a planned attack on Rubio’s spotty Senate attendance during the third Republican debate and prompted an overwhelmingly negative backlash toward his already struggling campaign. To make matters worse, Rubio seized on the moment with a rejoinder that in many ways summarized Bush’s problem.
“The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you,” Rubio said of Bush’s criticism.
Bush, who vowed to run a substantive campaign on the issues, was now the reluctant antagonist toward a candidate he championed for years as a next-generation leader.
Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Romney’s campaign who is unaffiliated for 2016, said it was always expected that the candidates would draw a contrast. But he questioned the attention drawn by Bush allies to their process, which Madden said would only give Rubio and his team ample time to prepare a response.
“From a pure tactical standpoint, don’t give your opponents a take-home exam,” Madden said. “It’s turned it into much more of a process story, and it also runs counter to the promises that [Bush] keeps making himself about running a ‘joyful’ campaign.”
The pre-emptive strikes, when leaked to the media, have also made way for quotes – sometimes anonymous, sometimes on the record – from anxious Bush donors who disagree with the campaign’s decision to go after Rubio.
“So one of the story lines coming out of it is, this is not a strategy that is fully endorsed by the folks who are supportive of Bush,” Madden said. “And in a way that serves to undercut the effectiveness of it.”
Parallels have been drawn to the contentious primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008. Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama aide, tweeted on Tuesday that the Clinton campaign “similarly telegraphed a coming assault on Obama” back then. “We raised money, organized off it and used the leak as a shield,” Pfeiffer said.
Bill Burton, another Obama campaign alum, agreed.
“The way they’ve set this up, they’ve given Rubio something to fundraise off of and something to organize around,” Burton said.
Indeed, Rubio’s campaign was out with a fundraising blast by Tuesday morning in an emailed titled, “This is a Joyful Campaign???” Referring to the New York Times story, Rubio’s campaign manager Terry Sullivan wrote to supporters: “You read that right. Jeb’s plan is to spend $20m dollars to ‘damage Mr Rubio’s reputation.’ Not just talk about how they differ on the issues but to actively try to destroy Marco’s reputation.”
“Honestly, it’s something we’d expect from Hillary and the mainstream media, but the fact that the Republican establishment believes this is what they need to do to take down Marco is astonishing.”
Several prominent Republicans sided with Rubio’s campaign. Bill Kristol, a longtime conservative pundit and editor of the Weekly Standard, tweeted: “Every donor to Right to Rise who doesn’t want his money used for destructive assault on @marcorubio should call and ask for his money back.”
Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist at the Washington Post, wrote that the Bush campaign’s game plan was “at the very least disheartening”.
“It should not be surprising, however, to discover that he is another cynical pol whose own message is so weak that his only alternative is to diminish others,” she wrote.
Having worked for a campaign at the receiving end of a similar assault, Burton said it was always inevitable that Bush would eventually have to go negative in order to win. The issue, he said, was not the shots themselves but their delivery and timing.
“The problem is that he’s barely introduced himself to voters and as a result attacks are a lot less credible coming from someone you don’t really know that well,” Burton said.
“Jeb Bush has not been able to find who he is and campaign as that person.”
