You would think it would take longer for our collective political memory to fade—especially when it comes to someone like George W. Bush, who was, you’ll recall, a full-spectrum failure of a president, with a hand in policy disasters both foreign and domestic. Under his watch, America lit one trillion-with-a-T dollars on fire for a war in Iraq that went so badly it has, in comparison, made Afghanistan look like The Good War. And Bush, who took over the White House (under the shadiest of circumstances) as the tech bubble was imploding, actively egged on the housing bubble that would cause global grief for the economy by the end of his term. Oh, and then there was Katrina.
So, with a record of policies that killed, injured, or “merely” immiserated hundreds of thousands of people, of course the Republicans are actively courting George’s little brother Jeb as a candidate for 2016. The latest news, care of the Washington Post, is that the GOP is starting to realize Chris Christie is not, in fact, going to be unbeatable, thanks to the corruption in his administration—but party greybeards are just as alarmed by the rise of Rand Paul of Kentucky. It seems, then, that what the Republican Party needs is a good old-fashioned political dynasty to reassert itself quickly enough to soak up all the donor money.
We could dismiss the need to rehash George W. Bush’s record if there were any sign the Republicans were willing to let the past stay in the past. Instead, we’ve got the aforementioned Paul saying Bill Clinton demonstrated “predatory behaviour” and that the media gave him a free pass, an assertion that will be hysterically funny to anyone old enough to have turned on television news circa 1998-2000. Is Paul simply making ridiculous statements because reasons, or is he trying to innoculate himself against accusations of sexism the next time a GOP candidate says something about “legitimate rape”? Does it matter?
Regardless, Paul matters, because it’s probably him that people are talking about when they tell the Post the GOP needs someone with sufficient “gravitas” to defeat Hillary Clinton. It’s a pretty stunning turnaround for Clinton, who would probably have been hard to beat in 2016 even if she hadn’t spent four years as Secretary of State. That the woman the Republicans spent the early 2000s mocking as a lightweight carpetbagger in her position as senator—and spent the 1990s saying much, much worse about—is now considered so difficult to beat is saying something indeed.
But in Jeb Bush’s case, it’s not clear what gravitas is actually supposed to mean. His position on immigration reform has the advantage of being only slightly less awful than what we can usually expect from the Republican Party, but even that’s not a sure thing: his 2013 book was a step backwards, as he tried to aim for the moving target that is Tea Party outrage.
The larger question, of course, is whether the Republicans are actually going to embrace any policy changes to try to accommodate themselves to the changing demographic universe in which they live. We learned this month that one year after a brutal “autopsy” of the 2012 election, the GOP is basically sticking to its guns and won’t change course. So it’s guns, gay-bashing, and fearmongering about immigration and Muslims for the foreseeable future.
Given that record, Jeb Bush starts to look like a smart choice after all.
