Donald Trump says that Jeb Bush, the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination in recent polls, views him as a serious political threat, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Said Trump: “Trust me, he takes me seriously.”
He added: “I actually felt bad because I hit him very hard one day. I really think he’s a nice man… I don’t know if I want him negotiating with ISIS. I think Trump will do a lot better.”
Bloomberg: “All the major candidates in the 2016 race will have super PACs working on their behalf, but Bush and Murphy are trying something unprecedented in U.S. presidential elections: building a separate, and better-funded, organization that will in some ways eclipse the official campaign as a vehicle for promoting the candidate. Murphy’s Los Angeles-based team will produce digital marketing, television ads, and opposition research on behalf of Bush, whose campaign headquarters are across the country in Miami.”
Said Bush: “He’s a good friend, and I’m going to miss him. I hope to see him on election night and give him an embrace. But from here on out, I won’t be talking to him.”
“For the second time in less than two weeks, Jeb Bush is shuffling the top tier of his 2016 campaign staff,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The job of political director – expected to go to Kentucky-based consultant Scott Jennings – will instead be filled by David James, who served as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. He has also worked at the Republican National Committee and helped lead the Pennsylvania Republican Party.”
“The super PAC supporting Jeb Bush, now walled off from the candidate because of campaign finance rules, hopes to ‘weaponize‘ its fund-raising total for the first six months of the year,” the New York Times reports.
“The comment from Mike Murphy, a veteran adviser to Mr. Bush who is now running the political action committee that will back the campaign, came as the group is focused on raising as much money as possible in the final days of its first fund-raising period, contributing to what is expected to be a significant financial edge over the rest of the Republican field.”
Jeb Bush won’t commit to campaigning alongside his brother, former President George W. Bush, the Washington Post reports.
Said Jeb: “He’s been helpful already. He’s helped — in gatherings where it wasn’t inconvenient for him. And I — sure I’d love to have his help. But — by the way — the last time I saw my brother’s approval rating, or favorability rating, it’s higher than that of President Obama’s. He’s — he’s had a pretty good post-presidency.”
He added: “I’m– you know, I’m George’s brother, I love him. I know for me to be successful, this has to be about my ideas and about my life experience and about the future.”
“There is no doubt the heir to one of America’s most successful political dynasties charted his own path in Florida, but he also leaned on family ties in business and politics, according to a Wall Street Journal review of public records and correspondence from the White House.”
“The dichotomy speaks to a core challenge of Mr. Bush’s campaign: explaining to voters that ‘I am my own man’ and resisting policy comparisons with previous Bush administrations—while banking on his family’s fundraising network.”
“I’d love to see him on a Harley. So if he wants to come in and ride a Harley, I’ll get him hooked up.”
— Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), quoted by National Journal, inviting Jeb Bush to Iowa.
“While their visions for America couldn’t be more different, the dueling kickoff rallies of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush — coming just 52 hours apart after years of anticipation in both parties — served to underscore a striking fact: Their political problems are remarkably similar,” Politico reports.
“A central struggle for both is escaping their famous families — and their political operations have accordingly marketed the candidates around their first names only: Clinton’s logo is a squat blue “H” pierced by a red arrow, while Bush’s is a big red “Jeb” punctuated by an exclamation point. And while neither has created much distance from his or her family, both have inched away from their kins’ policy legacies.”
Jeb Bush, “heir to one of American’s most successful political dynasties, sought to jump-start his presidential campaign Monday as a scrappy political outsider after failing in recent months to emerge as the undisputed front-runner for the 2016 Republican nomination,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Washington Post: “With his mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, sitting in the front row, Jeb Bush directly confronted the family history that is both an asset and a liability. His father and brother, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, were not present, but he invoked them by saying that he met his first president the day he was born and his second when he was taken home from the hospital.”
Politico: 5 takeaways from Jeb’s announcement
Gerald Seib: “In that six-month stretch, Mr. Bush has borne the brunt of his two biggest problems—the fact that his famous name has become as much burden as asset, and the antipathy of many conservatives toward his immigration and education positions—without the ability to fully counter them. Convincing voters he isn’t just another guy named Bush requires offering the kind of fully formed rationale for a candidacy that only a real campaign can provide; easing conservative concerns requires the kind of extended conversation in the party’s trenches that a primary debate requires.”
“It’s also possible, of course, that Mr. Bush simply can’t overcome those two obstacles—that the time isn’t right, or has passed him by. Yet it seems likely that he is a better marathon runner than a sprinter, somebody who benefits from more exposure rather than less, and who has the money to endure a race that figures to be stretched out simply because of the time needed to winnow an extraordinarily large field.”
First Read: “Hillary Clinton (who’s begun her big kickoff rallies) and Jeb Bush (who officially announces his presidential bid today) have one other similarity beyond their famous last names: Their messages and paths to the White House are about grinding it out.”
“For Hillary, that was evident in her Saturday speech at Roosevelt Island in New York. If you were expecting the electricity of an Obama event in 2007-2008 or even 2012, you were mistaken. Instead, you got a candidate promising to fight and grind it out… And while she has maybe the clearest path to winning a party’s presidential nomination in modern times, her general-election strategy will be all about pushing that Democratic coalition to a third-straight presidential win, which won’t be easy. As for Jeb, his path to winning the GOP nomination is all about grinding out — in a large GOP field and to a Republican audience that might be resistant to his message on immigration and Common Core.”
“Jeb Bush’s laser focus on fundraising has sent him crisscrossing the country over the past six months to headline roughly 70 money events as he tries to smash existing presidential campaign records,” Politico reports.
“Rarely taking off more than a day or two off the money chase, Bush has held fundraisers in at least 15 different states and Puerto Rico, with event tickets ranging from $25 to $100,000 per person… The full-court press is a key component of his campaign strategy to shut out potential rivals from megadonors, cement himself as the Republican establishment candidate and create the most ambitious presidential fundraising operation in history — all before even announcing his White House bid.”
Jeb Bush “might still take exactly this path to the nomination. But the striking — and surprising — thing about his candidacy is that he will formally enter the race Monday bearing many of the costs of the center-right approach without seeming to enjoy many of the benefits,” the New York Times reports.
“He has not won the invisible primary, the behind-the-scenes competition for elite support that often decides the nomination, and he has not even emerged as a favorite of the party’s large block of more moderate voters. He starts in a weaker position than not only his brother in 1999 or his father in 1987, but also Mitt Romney in 2011.”
Jeb Bush “will enter a presidential contest — unruly in size, unyielding in pace and voracious in cost — that is unlike any faced by his father, George Bush, who won the office in 1988, or his brother, George W. Bush, who claimed it in 2000,” the New York Times reports.
“And as the third member of his family to seek the nation’s highest office, he brings to the race a last name that at once burnishes and tarnishes, evoking the nobility of public service and a deep distrust of political entitlement. Mr. Bush’s campaign will highlight that tension on Monday with the selection of a spare logo, first used in his failed 1994 race for governor, that excludes his surname. It reads simply Jeb!”
Politico: ” Jeb Bush isn’t a fresh face. The conservative base isn’t enamored of him. And his family name isn’t necessarily an asset… That leaves Bush with one straightforward path to the GOP nomination: an argument based on his durability and electability.”
Jeb Bush told CNN that he believes he’ll be in a better position to break away from the rest of the Republican field when he announces his presidential candidacy.
Said Bush: “People make up their minds in the last weeks of these primaries. My expectation is we’ll have slow, steady progress. That’s been the expectation all along.”
Jeb Bush “may not be nearly as strong in Florida as his reputation suggests. A Bloomberg Politics study conducted with University of Florida political scientist Daniel A. Smith found that nearly three-quarters of Florida’s 12.9 million currently registered voters have never even seen Bush’s name on a ballot.”
“By contrast, 92 percent of Floridians who voted when Marco Rubio was last on the ballot, in 2010, are still registered.”
New York Times: “When Mr. Bush’s brother George first ran for president, he erroneously referred to Greeks as ‘Grecians,’ flubbed the name of India’s president and confused Slovenia with Slovakia, offering the world an unabashed portrait of provinciality.”
“But across Europe this week, Jeb Bush revealed himself to be a very different kind of Bush: well traveled, almost encyclopedically knowledgeable about foreign countries, and possessing the genuine inquisitiveness that his brother had so notably lacked… Mr. Bush’s trip here has been a reminder that his attempt to escape the shadow of his older brother, as awkward and halting as it may be, is not just a political strategy. It reflects how dissimilar the two men really are, in temperament, interests and preparation.”
“A book on character co-written by Jeb Bush in 1995 had been all but forgotten — until he decided to explore a White House bid in 2016,” USA Today reports.
“Now Democrats are spotlighting passages of the book Profiles in Character in which Bush called for ‘the restoration of shame’ to help combat out-of-wedlock births, youth crime and destructive behavior in general… Asked about the book during this week’s trip to Europe, Bush said many of his views have ‘evolved’ since its publication in 1995, ‘but my views about the importance of dads being involved in the lives of children hasn’t changed at all.'”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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