Many thanks to dogged commentor Brachiator for a most enjoyable read, Chris Lehman’s LRB report from early June on “the race for the Republican nomination“…
It is a cliché of American electioneering for candidates to advertise their humble beginnings and unstinting ascent in the face of adversity… But the emerging field of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election is something else altogether. Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way.
There is, for starters, George’s younger brother Jeb… Jeb has dined out for most of his career on his image as the clever Bush brother, but as his quasi-campaign heated up and the press started to ask questions about actual policies, he immediately undermined this unearned plaudit by saying he would have followed to the letter George’s catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq. After realising that this was a position now seen as insane even by most Republicans, he tried to retreat from it with a series of flailing clarifications.
Jeb Bush’s own track record is terrible. He was elected as governor of Florida in 1998, touting his ambitious plan to ‘reform’ – i.e. privatise – the state’s underperforming schools. The actual returns of his ‘education miracle’ are equivocal at best: it’s hard to tell how individual schools are performing because the letter-grade system he instituted (from A to F) is recalibrated almost every year in an attempt to improve the figures…
Bush’s other accomplishments in office include two curiously complementary policy fiascos: signing the nation’s first ever ‘stand your ground’ gun law (the legislation that gave us the Trayvon Martin killing and countless other instances of unpunished citizen bloodletting); and prolonging the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in a cynical bid to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s black electorate on his watch…
Bush’s long litany of failure merits close study both because, in spite of it all, he represents the sober, can-do face of executive GOP leadership, and because nearly every other candidate in the crowded Republican field recapitulates his slog into market mediocrity. Failure isn’t just an option for the vast company of Republican presidential hopefuls, it’s a well-trodden career path. Take Marco Rubio, a former protégé of Bush, who is often hailed as the great other-than-white hope for a party that fares badly among younger and Latino voters. On paper, Rubio presents as an American success story in the log-cabin mould: the son of struggling Cuban immigrants, he scaled the heights of the American meritocracy… But Rubio’s roster of actual achievements is notably thin – and sometimes disturbing. The Daily Mail recently revisited Rubio’s tenure as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 2007 and 2008, and found that despite declaring a net worth of just $8000 when he left the legislature, he had charged $160,000 to his party-issued AmEx card…
Long Read: “The Candidates (good grief)”Post + Comments (256)