A colossal miscalculation, in my opinion:
"If other campaigns wish that we’re going to uncork money on Donald Trump, they’ll be disappointed," said Mike Murphy, chief strategist of [Jeb Bush's] Right to Rise PAC. "Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem. We’d be happy to have a two-way race with Trump in the end, and we have every confidence that Governor Bush would beat him"….
Murphy said the super PAC would concentrate instead on "telling the Jeb story."
Trump is an eating machine, and he's devouring Jeb Bush. Should the contest come down to just the two — which it very well could — then Trump will have picked up the Perry vote, the Cruz vote, the Santorum vote, the Huckabee vote, the Jindal and Graham vote (if there is any), as well as the "outsider" Carson and even the vicious Fiorina vote. Bush will be left with his increasingly pathetic following and the scattered scraps of the vanishing Walker and Rubio camps.
Tell "the Jeb story"? — whatever the hell that means. It assumes that Republican primary voters will care about tales of the most monotonous presidential candidate since Tom Dewey (who actually did have a story to tell). They don't care. They want entertainment, and are they not entertained by Trump?
Bush's only hope of survival lies in resecting the malignancy that is Donald Trump, and, of course, doing so as early as possible. Instead of being pulled into the gravitational forces of Trumpist stupidity — Bush is now muttering general-election hauntings such as "anchor babies," which, for good reason, he swore he wouldn't do — Bush must somehow mobilize Republican "moderates"; he must inspire them to vote in the primaries; and he can only do that by matching bile with bile, for that is the way of GOP politics.
He must shatter his own monotony. He must eviscerate Trump now, in a massive advertising campaign, or face an aggregated mob of Trumpeteers down the road.
If he fails to go negative — try any line of attack, try every conceivable line of attack, but for God's sake attack — in another three or four months, Bush will have nothing left to build on.
How has playing nice worked out for others? "[I]n the be-like-Trump camp is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has fallen behind Trump in must-win Iowa." Rubio, too, is going down: He "is sticking studiously to his positive generational message, even though he is being drowned out."
Tolerance and imitation aren't working for the non-Trumps. The man of the GOP year is eating them alive — and if Team Bush really believes that Donald Trump is "other people's problem," a problem that will simply go away, then the Bush camp is more delusional than we ever imagined.
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