In a Friday post, American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman didn’t predict who will win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, but he did predict that two potential candidates, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, won’t.
Waldman’s peg was a Wall Street Journal report that Jeb’s “closest advisers” have asked GOP donors and operatives to “avoid committing to other possible presidential candidates until [Jeb] decides” after the midterms whether he’s going to run.
In Waldman’s view, the nominee will be someone who can dance to the party base’s tune (which he thinks eliminates Jeb) but who’s not so far right that he turns off swing voters (so scratch Cruz, whose “spittle-flecked denunciations of Barack Obama” apparently are too fervent or frequent or both).
From Waldman’s post (emphasis added):
I get that Bushes look upon national office as a birthright, and any prominent Republican probably looks at the field of potential 2016 contenders and says, "I could beat those guys"…The problem is that the party has left [Jeb] behind.
It isn't just a couple of issues like immigration and Common Core that would make things so hard for him. It's that the dynamics within the GOP have shifted. To characterize it as a battle between the base and the establishment oversimplifies things. Mitt Romney showed that it might be possible for a candidate to be establishment in his bones, but don the vestments of a Tea Partier, perform the rituals of genuflection, and slide into the nomination (and it wouldn't hurt if your competition was a bunch of chuckleheads)...
Jeb's problem is that the party's threshold keeps moving right, and the very fact of his Bushness, plus the fact that he is indeed (at least in people's perception) the "establishment candidate," means that he'd probably have to campaign in a tricorner hat and get a picture of Sarah Palin tattooed on his neck to convince Tea Partiers they can trust him. I could be wrong, but I just don't think he has it in him.
The person who wins the 2016 GOP nomination is going to be the one who can satisfy both the base and the elite, who can deliver spittle-flecked denunciations of Barack Obama and also convince the party leaders that he can appeal to a general electorate. I don't know who that'll be, but it won't be someone too firmly in the former camp (like Ted Cruz), nor will it be someone from the latter camp (like Jeb). Somebody will prove themselves able to build a bridge between the two sides, but Jeb really doesn't look like the candidate who can do that. If he really is the smart one, he'll figure that out before he goes to all the trouble of mounting a campaign.
