A Jeb (!) Bush campaign crowd is unlike the generic Republican campaign crowd that has cropped up on television over the last six years. You don’t have to cram all those normal people into the frame, because they’re the only ones in it. There are no people dressed as Uncle Sam on stilts. Nobody wears breeches or carries a fake blunderbuss. There are many, many, many polo shirts and perhaps even more pleated chinos. The Jeb (!) Bush fans – what few are left of them, or ever existed, with a full year until Election Day – skew decidedly middle-aged and up, and they look a lot like those people who, when they heard George HW Bush say “stay the course”, back in 1988, decided to do exactly that.
So if you shuttled your way between the flailing former frontrunner-in-waiting’s I-can-fix-it events across Florida on Friday night and again on Monday, the most unique human being amid a Jeb (!) Bush crowd was the Puerto Rican man in a mustard-suede blouse and blue jeans that either cost $200 to distress until they looked like they were covered in builder’s clay, or else were just covered in builder’s clay.
He had come to the United States from Puerto Rico last Tuesday to support Jeb (!) Bush because, as he explained in halting English, “I met his grandfather when I was 12 years old,” though he didn’t seem to know whether Prescott or George HW Bush was Jeb’s grandfather, exactly. He spent two minutes trying to find a photograph of the man in question on an ancient flip phone before being distracted by a call and wandering off.
During every applause line at Monday’s rally in Tampa (“The campaign trail is littered with candidates disguised as television critics!”; something about Lincoln being a “loser”; time to reject Obama’s role of “divider”-in-chief), the man from Puerto Rico blew through a referee’s whistle as if he were in the end zone of a soccer game, to the displeasure of those closest to him.
It is a tinny, ugly thing, this – this offhanded pre-usurpation of what was presumed to be destiny for Jeb (!). This is the man who has not cropped up on your television screen over the last six years and who lately emerges from the memory hole only to be Whack-A-Mole’d by his own gaffes or by a debate disaster heard ’round the part of the world that cares about such things. Even his new fans dwell as much in the past as the candidate offering chiefly that.
Another man, William R King, dressed in a neat black suit and bearing business cards for his legal interpreter’s services, said his enthusiastic support for Jeb (!) had compelled him to attend a political rally on Monday for the first time in his life, at age 78. He described growing up in Haiti in a house with several servants, emigrating to the United States and how Jeb (!) must absolutely secure the border with Mexico. He then explained how immigrants evade the border patrol, and how he once helped a friend who was an executive at Pemex flee Mexico to avoid extradition.
“[Ben] Carson to me is like Papa Doc [Duvalier],” he said, before intimating that the US allowed the brutal Haitian ruler to come to power in 1957 as a dry-run for handling post-colonial Africa. Then the man from Haiti changed gears. “Make him secretary of health. Let him learn about the government, and see if he can be president.”
On Bush himself, though, the old man sounded no different than the chamber-of-commerce types who dominate Jeb (!) rallies and probably read the candidate’s taking the stage to the Canadian band Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s song Takin’ Care of Business like something of a wink.
“Jeb has been a great governor, Reagan was a great governor. What’s wrong with putting him up there? He left us every year with excess money, added jobs. And education!”
When it comes to the candidate’s record, even this Bush’s offbeat supporters sound like everyone else: even the oddballs flip the script.
Jeb (!) Bush is not the candidate on television. His presence on your screen is an exercise in atavism, 10 years of political history already aging like half a century, a “responsible-government” actuarial type still talking about tax forms when everyone else is playing the dozens, trolling via Snapchat and firing bacon guns in an endlessly apocalyptic juvenile slapfest.
Jeb (!) Bush is a voice saying, “Fellas, quit horsing around”, while the end of the world is started in a boys’ gym class.
Which meant, of course, that it was time for the new Jeb (!) Bush again, who couldn’t help but still be the old one. At a rally on Monday morning at the Tampa Garden Club, Bush announced his refusal to be anyone other than himself and launched his relaunch: “I Can Fix It.”
“After seven years of incompetence and gridlock in Washington, we need a president who can fix it,” he said. “I can fix it.” Foreign policy? “I can fix it.” Reduce deficits while reversing cuts to the military budget? “I can fix it.”
Monday morning’s announcement bracketed a weekend that began with a smaller but similar gathering on Friday, in nearby Punta Gorda. Billed as a “tailgate party” for the region’s rivalry football game between Punta Gorda’s Charlotte high school and Port Charlotte’s Port Charlotte high, the event was more of a homecoming for Jeb (!) Bush version 2.0, the one who had won reelection as Florida governor.
Despite looking everything like a 100-person rally without any tailgate trappings whatsoever, Bush’s address in the parking lot of the Deep Creek church, with the Charlotte high stadium in the background, was an immediate reminder to locals of the governor’s work to help the region recover in the aftermath of hurricane Charley 11 years before. A sign at the rally’s entrance, one not provided by the campaign but evidently welcomed by it, touted Bush’s record as “The Hurricane Governor”, a nickname that has earned bipartisan endorsement in the state.
The question for Bush remains how he can tout his record of efficient, responsive government in a Republican field that has been defined by its hostility toward government of any sort. So far his answer seems to be splitting the difference by way of ambiguity. On Friday, standing before supporters waving the not-yet fully launched “Jeb Can Fix It” signs, Bush touted the value of government on a local level: “Government does work in certain places with the right kind of leadership ... and I know how to fix things.”
In Jeb (!) Bush terms, he spoke animatedly. For eight minutes, he hit the stump outline in his head, floating a few terms that would solidify by Monday morning. Some folks in the church parking lot crowd even volunteered a “That’s right!” and a nod of affirmation, before Bush’s pace took them away.
“We wanted to see him for real, because up there in the [debate] lineup with everyone, that’s a much different dynamic than one-on-one,” said Diana Dodge, who attended with her brother Luckey, both of whom are still working in Punta Gorda despite having reaching retirement age. “He didn’t have to compete with all those people.”
Even the people who are 100% for Jeb (!) seem to want his campaign to capture the undecideds by outlasting the options.
“Governor Bush has a tremendous record,” Tampa-based attorney Thomas Hyde said on Monday morning. “He has a vision, and this is a marathon. You just have to tell it like it is. He can win.”
It is an answer you hear over and over, a tactic cast from the 1990s mold of politics: be inspirational if you can, but be funded and be probable. The Bush campaign seems to be playing to the politics of the long view, if not only to manage expectations but to signal a return to doing what the candidate does well: normality, or at least what normal was before it wasn’t new anymore.
“I will not be an angry candidate,” Bush declared on Friday. Monday, he added: “This election is not about a set of personalities; it’s about a set of principles.”
Bush paused, as if to induce a call-and-response with “I can fix it!” line. But the old-school crowd did not take up the older-school candidate’s chant, outside of a few isolated voices here and not exactly there. Nor did Jeb (!) say how he would fix each issue he named. Instead, he cited Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address to bear “malice toward none”, then went into a routine about how an unusually tall, wonky man like Lincoln could never survive modern imaging and messaging consultants.
Here was the Hurricane Governor, a technocrat angling in a contest that has been prizing inexperience. So he stood at a garden club in a part of south Florida that floods during any severe tropical storm and gazed across the jewel of the Tampa bayshore – a nearly five-mile gleaming white balustrade, atop a sidewalk and a sea wall, all built by the Works Progress Administration – promising to fix things but allowing himself only the tool of ambiguity, assuming his party will allow him any at all.
Long before we get to the rest of the country, that Jeb (!) can fix his own campaign – that, in fact, his campaign might itself not be the problem – seems right now like the most uncertain promise of all.
