So every day Republicans seek to batten on fear of terrorism in a repetition of their success in 2002 and 2004, it’s important to recognize how much has changed since then. In particular, there is very recent evidence that a fear-based 2016 campaign message won’t necessarily work against Democrats, and specifically Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. I wrote about this today at New York:

With a thousand points of darkness pointing toward a fear-of-terrorism-based Republican presidential election, it’s important to remember that the likely Democratic nominee has some national-security credentials of her own. An ABC/Washington Post poll released last week shows that when Americans are asked “Who would you trust more to handle the threat of terrorism?” Hillary Clinton leads every named Republican rival.
The Post‘s Greg Sargent laid it out:

On the question of who is more trusted to handle terrorism, Clinton leads Trump among Americans by 50-42; she leads Ben Carson by 49-40; she leads Ted Cruz by 48-40; she leads Marco Rubio by 47-43; and she leads Jeb Bush by 46-43. In fairness, the last two of those are not statistically significant leads, and among registered voters, her lead “slims or disappears.” But this poll does suggest at a minimum that there is no clear edge for the GOP candidates over Clinton on the issue.
What’s striking here is that it comes even as Obama’s approval on terrorism is down to 40 percent. As Post polling guru Scott Clement notes, the poll shows a sizable bloc of voters who disapprove of Obama on terrorism but nonetheless say they trust Clinton over her GOP rivals on the issue.

So all the attacks on HRC about Benghazi! and alleged security breaches and her association with a president who has been attacked like no president since FDR haven’t significantly eroded her national security credentials. It’s not clear if that fact will convince Republicans to take another tack, or will instead incite them to go even more ballistic on terrorism and national security issues. We will know soon, and perhaps so loudly that even more votes will believe Democrats can bring them peace.

After the latest gun massacre in San Bernardino, and before a whole lot was known about the killers and their motives, there was already a sense of ennui setting in among Beltway elites about the tedious gun policy debate that would soon set it. At New York today, I wrote about this deplorable refusal to deal with the gun policy issue:

Liberals need to understand, however, that it’s precisely this fatigue, and the underlying assumption that both sides in the perpetual “gun debate” are equally to blame for its unproductive nature, that is the secret weapon of the NRA and Second Amendment ultras everywhere. There are obviously many other things that are relevant to a gun massacre, from possible terrorist links to mental-health issues. But gun policy should always be in order after a gun massacre.
That’s not how the King of False Equivalency, National Journal columnist Ron Fournier, sees it, of course. In his first post-San Bernardino piece, he excoriates gun-control advocates (among whom he placed himself) for offending the tender sensibilities of all those gun-control opponents who are piously calling for prayer rather than legislation.

Re­pub­lic­ans are do­ing more than pray­ing. They’re not do­ing nearly enough, from my vant­age point, but if we’re go­ing to move bey­ond verbal wars and ac­tu­ally start fix­ing this prob­lem, the first step is to ac­know­ledge the oth­er side’s point of view. Un­der­stand it. Re­spect it. Then ex­ploit it.
For ex­ample, couldn’t a smart group of gun con­trol ad­voc­ates seize on the Na­tion­al Rifle As­so­ci­ation’s talk­ing point about men­tal health and work to­ward ma­jor re­forms of the U.S. sys­tem?

Does a single soul other than Ron Fournier think the NRA will expend an ounce of its vast political capital fighting for reforms in the U.S. mental-health system? I doubt it. And why should they? They are not the National Rifle and Mental Health Association. And so the injunction to gun-control advocates to find some way to work with Wayne LaPierre after changing the subject from guns is a counsel of surrender and despair.
If the next mass-killing spree in this country is conducted by dynamite, harpoons, or crossbows, and liberals talk about gun control, Fournier and other critics will have a point. But not this time. And it really doesn’t matter if certain elites find the topic boring.

Unfortunately, we may not have to wait that long to come to grips with this issue all over again.

Tonight the premier Christian Right organization in Iowa, and hence an organization with national influence, the Iowa Family Leader is holding it presidential forum, with at least seven presidential candidates showing up. I wrote about the atmosphere surrounding this event at the Washington Monthly:

Word going in is that Ted Cruz, who was endorsed by Steve King earlier this week, might get endorsed “personally” tonight by Family Leader majordomos Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley, a move they made (albeit a bit later) for Rick Santorum in 2012. BVP, and his most simpatico national Christian Right warhorse, Tony Perkins, have been making a lot of noise about the need for conservative evangelicals to unite behind a single candidate before Iowa. Cruz does seem to be the best positioned. It would likely be a pretty deadly blow to Santorum and Huckabee, and at least a challenge to Ben Carson, who’s been polling very well among Iowa evangelicals.
But there’s a discordant voice at the edge of these Christian Right counsels, shouting “Not so fast!”–Southern Baptist Convention spokesman Russell Moore, who thinks it would be a terrible mistakes for Christians to identify with any candidate who has been demagoguing refugees.
Moore said so in a WaPo op-ed published yesterday.

[E]vangelical Christians cannot be the people who turn our back on our mission field. We should be the ones calling the rest of the world to remember the image of God and inalienable human dignity, of persecuted people whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Yazidi, especially those fleeing from genocidal Islamic terrorists.
We should remember the history of the 20th century, of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and Refuseniks from the Soviet Union who were largely ignored by the world community. We can have prudential discussions and disagreements about how to maintain security. What we cannot do is to demagogue the issue.

Moore didn’t name names in the op-ed, but did upon sitting down with BuzzFeed‘s McKay Coppins for an interview:

“Donald Trump is saber-rattling about shutting down mosques in this country, which, as somebody who works every day on religious liberty, I’m astounded that we could have a presidential candidate of either party speaking in such a way,” Moore said. “Evangelicals should recognize that any president who would call for shutting down houses of worship … is the sort of political power that can ultimately shut down evangelical churches.”
Moore was also critical of candidates like Ted Cruz who are now arguing that the U.S. should only accept Christian refugees from Syria, not Muslims.
“I don’t think we ought to have a religious test for our refugee policy,” Moore said, adding that a rigorous vetting process could still make room for innocent Muslims. “We really don’t want to penalize innocent women and children who are fleeing from murderous barbarians simply because they’re not Christians,” he said, though he added that persecuted Christians in the region haven’t received enough attention from the U.S.

This is hardly the first time Moore has cut a very different figure from his predecessor, Ted Land, who was an old-school Christian Right agitator like Perkins and Vander Plaats. It’s also not clear how much if any political influence Moore has; he’s a guy who has criticized conservative evangelicals’ excessive ties to the Republican Party, and even questioned how high a priority conservative cultural issues ought to have for active Christians. Southern Baptists are not especially numerous in Iowa, but nor are they out of synch with the state’s conservative evangelicals, viz. 2008 Caucus winner Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, and Cruz himself, who is a Southern Baptist.
We’ll see if Cruz starts to lock up some visible support this weekend, and then we’ll see of Russell Moore digs in.

It would be refreshing to have something emanating from the conservative Christian political world beyond the usual Kabuki Theater of demands for a better seat at the GOP table and then complaints about the chow.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who spent many months trying to outflank the rest of the GOP presidential field to the Right, finally packed it in today, and I had a lot to say about it at Washington Monthly.

It seemed like every time you turned around Jindal was relaunching or rebranding himself. Indeed, it tells you everything you need to know that I was mocking his eternal shape-shifting back in February of 2014, several incarnations ago:

His first big national audition, a universally panned State of the Union response in 2009, was a large whiff, given the drama of that moment, which exposed his signature talk-down-to-the-dummies problem as the smartest guy in the room trying to connect with the Unwashed. His next foray into national politics was to become the most conspicuous 2011-12 surrogate for Rick Perry just before the Texan’s once-formidable candidacy headed straight down the tubes.
Then, after a brief stint on Mitt Romney’s short-list for the vice presidency (before being elbowed out of the way by his rival whiz-kid Paul Ryan), Jindal was among the first Republicans out of the box with a big “rebranding” speech to an RNC audience in January of 2013. It created a slight buzz, but since its thrust was to tout the policy genius of state governments (while implicitly disrespecting all of his congressional rivals), it did not survive Jindal’s subsequent patch of very poor luck back in Baton Rouge, where his big tax proposal (phasing out the income tax in favor of higher sales and business taxes) was shot down by his own Republican-controlled legislature, while the courts sidelined his private-school voucher initiative.
By last autumn, Jindal was running in low single-digits in early 2016 presidential polls, and was pretty much being shoehorned into a small “diversity” box alongside fellow Indian-American Gov. Nikki Haley of SC….
But then Jindal finally caught a break, when the vagaries of the culture wars suddenly made one of his constituents, Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson, a national conservative icon of the highest order. Bobby clung to the grizzly homophobe like a life jacket, and now seems inclined to make his latest, and perhaps final pitch to a national conservative audience posing as the maximum defender of “religious liberty” against the politically correct hordes of secular elitism.

But he probably picked the wrong year for this gambit, what with far more authentic and credentialed Christian Right figures like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson in the field.
Like other candidates, Jindal suffered through the summer of 2015 being completely thwarted by the Donald Trump phenomenon. So he then chose his penultimate persona as a parasite on the bloated political body of The Donald. In a September speech that could have been entitled, “You Have to Cover This!” Jindal called Trump an “egomaniacal madman,” and kept the barrage up for a good while, with no impact on his target and little benefit to himself. His last gambit, deployed in several “undercard” debate appearances, was to position himself as a sort of Ted Cruz doppelganger, supporting ever-more irresponsible hostage-taking behavior on behalf of culture-war priorities like “defunding” Planned Parenthood. But again, why support a Ted Cruz doppelganger with Ted Cruz in the field, particularly since Cruz is slightly (if only slightly) more adept at hiding his contempt for the “base” audiences that His Exalted Genuis was being forced to demagogue.
Speaking of contempt, the big piece of collateral damage of Jindal 2016 has been the state of Louisiana, which he has alternatively ignored, abandoned and abused. The most telling thing about today’s development is that Jindal pulls out of the presidential race with four days left in the jungle-primary runoff to choose a successor to him, and you’d have to guess what extremely embattled Republican candidate U.S. Sen. David Vitter fears most is “help” from the sitting GOP governor of the state….
It would be richly appropriate for Jindal to deep-six Vitter, deliberately or not. You get the sense that his bags have been packed in Baton Rouge for a good long while. Everything about his resume screams “Cabinet post,” but the question is whether the nasty piece of work he’s proven himself to be in this campaign might disqualify him if Republicans win the White House. He might fit in better on K Street.

With the second Democratic presidential debate on tap for tomorrow night, there were two very good observations today at the New Republic for how the candidates might make the proceedings more relevant and urgent. I offered commentary at Washington Monthly:

The first [TNR piece], by Suzy Khimm, involves the actual choices a Democratic president would face given the extremely high likelihood that Republicans will hang onto the House and perhaps the Senate. That will heavily be influenced by the appetite and aptitude of said president for taking executive actions, especially in immigration and criminal justice policy. Khimm notes that some especially difficult decisions will have to be made in the latter area, since (a) bipartisan legislative action is a lively if not easy prospect, and (b) Democrats are not completely united about what to do at the federal level on, say, marijuana legalization. And then there’s this problem:

Some on the left…disagree, fearing that going too big on executive action could come back to haunt Democrats over the long haul. As University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner has argued in the New Republic, Obama’s turn to executive action on immigration could end up empowering future Republican presidents to push for non-enforcement of many other laws and regulations–and there are plenty, including environmental regulations and labor protections, that Republicans would love to get their hands on.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler looks at the same partisan landscape and deduces quite logically that the possibility of a Republican trifecta should make electability–specifically HRC’s electability–a much bigger issue in the Democratic contest than it has been up until now.

Sanders earned a lot of good will in the first debate by absolving Clinton of Republican attacks on her handling of State Department email. O’Malley has been consistently critical of Clinton not for being unelectable, but, if anything, for thinking too calculatingly about staying electable. “History celebrates profiles in courage, not profiles in convenience,” O’Malley said when Clinton endorsed a right to same-sex marriage earlier this year.
That’s the wrong approach for a serious candidate in the political climate Democrats face. If either Sanders or O’Malley can mount a convincing argument that Clinton–despite a vast name-recognition advantage, and unique appeal to female voters–isn’t the most electable Democrat, they are doing both themselves and their party a disservice by not airing it.

In other words, the enormous constraints facing a Democratic president that Khimm outlines make the implicit arguments of Sanders and O’Malley that HRC is not ideologically trustworthy could be a bit beside the point–especially if you adjudge Clinton as more willing or able to pursue executive action.
Beutler does not tell us how Clinton’s rivals can make electability a concern without being perceived as piling onto Republican attacks on her that (a) have no credibility among Democrats but (b) seem to be affecting indie perceptions of her. Indeed, he views this as a challenge so difficult–especially given Democratic fears of sexism in any left-bent criticism of HRC–that it might well push Sanders and O’Malley into conceding early if they cannot solve it. We’ll have to see if either rival to Clinton can begin to thread that needle in the next debate.

If fears of a Republican trifecta–and hence the urgency of electability–subside, then things will be looking up for Democrats sho nuff.

Democrats disappointed about the Kentucky elections have another off-cycle contest just ahead that is creating some unlikely optimism: the “jungle primary” runoff for governor in Louisiana. I wrote about the contest at Washington Monthly this week:

Looking at the polls (there are now three of them) showing Democrat John Bel Edwards with a double-digit lead over U.S. Sen. David Vitter in the November 21 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff, you’d figure Republicans would be focused on a unity effort to bring Vitter’s defeated GOP rivals into the tent. If so, the effort suffered a blow this morning, when Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne endorsed Edwards in the runoff. Kevin Litten of the Times-Pic has some background:

Although Dardenne originally indicated he wouldn’t offer an endorsement in the general election, the source said his thinking on the subject evolved over time. Dardenne and Edwards had been talking since election day (Oct. 24), when Dardenne and Republican candidate Scott Angelle were defeated by Edwards and U.S. Sen. David Vitter.
“He went from ‘No I won’t’ to ‘I would if…’ to ‘I might have to,’ to ‘Let’s do this now,'” the source said.
Both Dardenne and Angelle, were the subject of withering political attacks during the primary launched by U.S. Sen. David Vitter’s campaign and the super PACS supporting him. Angelle struck back hard, and Dardenne complained bitterly about the ads during the last two weeks of the campaign during debates before running an ad criticizing Vitter in the last days of the campaign.

Dardenne finished fourth in the primary with 15% of the vote.
Vitter countered with an endorsement from former Gov. Mike Foster, who left office in 2004. You’d normally figure a big target of any Republican unity campaign would be the sitting two-term Republican governor of the state. But according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, Bobby Jindal is in “not in a hurry” to endorse a successor:

Both candidates remaining in the governor’s race — Democrat John Bel Edwards and Republican David Vitter — have repeatedly criticized Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal on the campaign trail.
And it appears Jindal isn’t eager to pick which of the two he would prefer succeeds him in the Governor’s Office.
The National Review caught up with Jindal in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday and asked whom he prefers.
Jindal has frequently butted heads with both men.
“We haven’t made that decision yet,” Jindal, who is running for president, demurred when asked if he planned to endorse in the race, NRO reports. “That doesn’t mean we won’t. But we haven’t made that decision yet.”
It’s no secret that Jindal and Vitter have an icy relationship. And as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Edwards has been one of Jindal’s most vocal opponents at the State Capitol.

Well, I guess bipartisanship’s not dead in Louisiana. Not only do you have a former Republican candidate for governor endorsing a Democrat, but nobody much likes Bobby Jindal.

So whatever you think is happening to support levels for Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, there’s not much doubt Dr. Ben Carson is enjoying a significant boom in support. At TPMCafe today, I examined the varying sources of his support, and warned Democrats not to dismiss his campaign too readily:

The conventional wisdom is that Carson is beloved for being a genial, soft-spoken figure and a non-politician with a distinguished biography. That may be true, though this does not necessarily distinguish him from many thousands of his fellow Americans. An equally obvious factor is that he is African American, and Republicans frustrated with being accused of white identity politics if not outright racism love being able to support a black candidate who is as conservative as they are.
Less obvious — and finally being recognized by political reporters spending time in Iowa — is that Carson is a familiar, beloved figure to conservative evangelicals, who have been reading his books for years.
Another factor, and one that I emphasized in my own take here two months ago, is that Carson is a devoted believer in a number of surprisingly resonant right-wing conspiracy theories, which he articulates via dog whistles that excite fellow devotees (particularly fans of Glenn Beck, who shares much of Carson’s world-view) without alarming regular GOP voters or alerting the MSM.
As David Corn of Mother Jones has patiently explained, the real key for understanding Carson (like Beck) is via the works of Cold War-era John Birch Society member and prolific pseudo-historian W. Cleon Skousen, who stipulated that America was under siege from the secret domestic agents of global Marxism who masqueraded as liberals. Carson has also clearly bought into the idea that these crypto-commies are systematically applying the deceptive tactics of Saul Alinsky in order to destroy the country from within–a theme to which he alluded in the famous National Prayer Breakfast speech that launched his political career and in the first Republican presidential candidates’ debate.
It’s not clear how many Carson supporters hear the dog whistles and understand what his constant references to “political correctness” connote (it’s his all-purpose term for the efforts of America’s secret enemies to mock or silence cognoscenti like himself, Beck and Skousen), but added with his other advantages, it fills out his coalition with depth as well as breadth.
And that is why the broadly held assumption that Carson will, like 2012 candidate Herman Cain, quickly fade from contention as voting nears is worth rethinking. For one thing, Carson’s race is just one source of his appeal, so identifying him with the last black conservative to run for president is highly questionable.
Cain was not a revered figure before running in 2012, beyond those who listened when he sat in for an Atlanta-based radio host. He also was not exactly a non-politician, having run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. But the most important reason to stop identifying Carson with Cain is simple: Cain’s loss of his once-high poll ratings were not caused by a voters getting tired with a “flavor of the month” or realizing his slim qualifications; he was brought down by a series of sexual allegations that escalated from multiple claims of sexual harassment to a long-term extramarital affair. Cain never admitted any wrong-doing, but he also never convincingly rebutted the allegations, and all the smoke convinced many observers there might be fire. He left the race on his own terms, but after losing most of his altitude.
There’s zero reason to think Carson has any such skeletons in his closet. The one thing we know about his background that is politically dangerous is his testimonial work for a subsequently fined nutritional supplement company. But unless it turns out he was paid a lot more than seems to be the case, he’s only in hot water if he cannot soon keep his story straight. Being a straight shooter is extremely important to his image.
He seems to have successfully back-pedaled on his one easy-to-understand policy heresy, a proposal to replace Medicare and Medicaid with heavily subsidized health savings accounts, which he now describes as an “option” for beneficiaries (that, too, is problematic, but not as much as his original “idea”).
So there remains what should actually disqualify Carson: his extremist, paranoid “world-view” which treats regular boring old center-left liberals as conscious and systematically deceitful would-be destroyers of this country bent on imposing a Marxist tyranny via “politically correct” suppression of free speech and confiscation of guns.
There’s unquestionably a constituency for this point of view, but we may never know whether it would outnumber the Republicans baffled or horrified by it until such time as one of his rivals or the heretofore clueless media start talking about it. If they don’t pretty soon, then one theory of the 2016 GOP nominating process could come true: conservatives want to rerun the 1964 elections, and they’ve finally found their Barry Goldwater.

This is simply not a good year to assume anything conventional from Republican voters.

There’s a general assumption in the air in Washington that the two-year budget deal and the advent of Paul Ryan as Speaker means we can all stop worrying about conservative-generated chaos in Congress until after next year’s elections. That could be premature, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly:

For all the “cleaning the barn” talk about the two-year “budget deal” that cleared the Senate in the wee hours this morning, it does not actually resolve all the troublesome spending issues or eliminate the possibility of conservative mischief. As David Dayen notes at the Prospect, while the deal set overall spending levels, is does not obviate the need for actual appropriations bills.

That means we’re not finished with opportunities for hostage-taking, as conservatives can still hijack the budget process to earn long-sought victories. Attached to all of the existing appropriations bills are riders unrelated to the budget, affecting everything from social to environmental to financial regulatory policy.
In September, Public Citizen and hundreds of other organizations outlined just a sample of those riders. For example, the appropriations bills on offer would cancel all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. They would prevent enforcement of a proposed Labor Department regulation to mandate investment advisers to operate in their clients’ best interest. They would cancel the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules. They would stop environmental regulations on clean water, endangered species, and air-quality standards for ozone, and block an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule on toxic silica dust in the workplace. They would exempt flavored cigarettes currently on the market from regulation. They would halt the Securities and Exchange Commission from completing rules requiring publicly traded companies to disclose political spending. They would block rules limiting the hours long-haul truckers can spend on the road without rest. And they would change hundreds of other rules, regulations, and funding priorities….
The White House, in its statement on the budget deal, said that it would work with Congress “to enact responsible, full-year FY 2016 appropriations–without ideological riders–based on this agreement.” But there is nothing in the deal that prevents Congress from sending appropriations with these riders and daring the president to veto them. Everybody, therefore, has the same choices in front of them that existed before John Boehner announced his resignation.

Well, not all the same choices are available, since the use of the debt limit to extort policy changes is indeed off the table. But David’s right: the specter of a government shutdown over conservative demands to “defund” Planned Parenthood hasn’t been defused, and if as expected there’s another omnibus appropriations bill covering multiple federal agencies it will represent quite the hostage for such demands.
You can make the argument that the dynamics which made the budget deal possible–you know, the bipartisan desire to get to the elections without fresh crises in Congress–will inevitably prevent a big collision over appropriations, much less a shutdown. But keep in mind the only way out of an impasse will be the same Hastert-Rule-violating coalition of House Democrats and a minority of Republicans, and one of the prices Paul Ryan paid for that spanking new gavel he wields was a pledge to take the Hastert Rule more seriously.

Anyone assuming the furies lashing conservatives towards a strategy of maximum confrontation have been quelled may be mistaking a tactical quiet-before-the-storm for genuinely good weather.

For all the talk of “winners” and “losers” in the CNBC Republican presidential candidates’ debate last night, there was one near no-show: the big two-year bipartisan budget deal that passed the House a few hours before the debate began. I discussed this anomaly at TPMCafe:

Wednesday the most important economic/fiscal policy development of the entire presidential cycle occurred in Washington: The GOP-controlled House approved a two-year budget deal that takes away every conservative point of leverage until after the elections. It confirmed for the rank-and-file conservative “base” every suspicion about the gutless and treacherous Republican Establishment.
Yet in a GOP presidential debate Wednesday evening, the budget deal barely came up. Instead, for a variety of reasons, the candidates mostly took turns attacking the big dumb abstraction of Big Government as the cause of every conceivable problem, with Hillary Clinton and the feckless CNBC debate moderators getting beaten up nearly as much as Washington.
Perhaps it is telling that the budget deal was only emphasized by Rand Paul, a desperate candidate who had already announced he was going to filibuster the deal in the Senate when it comes up for a vote Thursday. Ted Cruz mentioned it, too, but only because it fits seamlessly into his usual rap. And John Kasich denounced it in passing but only to contrast it with his own alleged fiscal accomplishments way, way back in the day. Presumably the issue didn’t “work” for anyone else, and perhaps they were relieved to retreat to the minutiae of their tax plans and the vaguest and broadest suggestions that any federal involvement in any area of domestic government is to be opposed.

Maybe the candidates were just too deep into debate prep this week to notice the ground had shifted in Washington. I just don’t know.

Suffice it to say that the biggest winner of the entire day and night was Paul Ryan, whose two-faced response to a budget deal designed to make life easy for him received a tepid rebuke from Paul but nothing more. Unless there’s a real surprise in the Senate, it appears the GOP, including its presidential candidates, is ready to find some alternative to debt limit defaults and government shutdowns in order to smite its foes. Hearing them all sound like they want to go back to the governing philosophy of the Coolidge administration made me wonder if the biggest threat of all is that they might win next November.

There are still plenty of people, from moneybags donors to political scientists, along with some Democrats, who are convinced Jeb Bush will ultimately win the Republican presidential nomination. Maybe Bush himself is supremely confident despite his dubious poll ratings and the beatings he seems to take everytime he tries to engage Donald Trump.
But I have to say, Team Bush’s current situation just has to be discouraging, particularly when you consider what might have been, as I discussed today at the Washington Monthly:

A new Quinnipiac poll of Iowa shows Bush still scratching around the second tier of candidates at 5%, below even the doomed Rand Paul, and with an underwater approval ratio of 43/51. Worse yet, a new Bloomberg Politics/St. Anselm’s poll of New Hampshire shows that a month-long positive ad blitz by Murphy’s Right to Rise Super-PAC has done absolutely nothing to improve Jeb’s horse-race standing or his approval ratios.
Think about how this must feel to Jeb Bush himself. He’s been spending time in Iowa since 1980, when he campaigned there for Poppy. Yet the more Iowans see of him, the less they seem to like him, which is not a recipe for a late surge, is it?
More broadly, consider the arc of Jebbie’s political career. Had he not in his first gubernatorial run unaccountably stumbled against the He-Coon, Lawton Chiles, in the great Republican year of 1994, he would have almost certainly been the dynastic presidential candidate in 2000 with massive Establishment and Conservative Movement backing (indeed, he was universally considered the one True Conservative in the whole clan back then). As governor of Florida, he probably would not have needed a coup d’etat from the U.S. Supreme Court to carry the state and the election. He could have been the one to “keep us safe” after 9/11. As the most serious of the Bush brothers, he quite possibly would not have required Dick Cheney as a caretaker and foreign policy chief, and perhaps would not have rushed into an Iraq War so precipitously. With his experience governing a perennial hurricane target, Jeb almost certainly would not have mishandled Katrina so grievously. But any way you look at it, he’d probably by now be enjoying the warm embrace of a post-presidential career instead of enduring the insults of surly Tea Partiers on the campaign trail and looking up wistfully at the poll standings of people like Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
The Carson thing has got to be especially galling to Jeb. Here’s a guy who not only has never run for office, but is suspending his campaign to go on a book tour. Yet the same poll that shows a majority of Iowa Republicans disapproving of Jeb Bush gives Carson an almost unimaginable 84/10 ratio.
Maybe Bush has nerves of steel or Murphy has hired a hypnotist to accompany him everywhere and buzz away any consciousness of discouraging words. But if I were him I’d be tempted to blow the whole thing off and go make money until it’s time for assisted living. As it stands, Jeb must wonder if Lawton Chiles is laughing at him from the Great Beyond.