That Republican Civil War… It's Still Burning Out Of Control

One's indictable and one's… another Bush

The University of Florida released a poll last night showing Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio (and Hillary) with the highest popularity ratings in the Sunshine State's newest twist on a 2016 presidential survey. Nationally, the Big Money elites who call the shots in the GOP, want a top tier candidate to start focussing on already. Believe it or not, among GOP voters, Chris Christie, most likely next governor to face the fate Bob McDonnell just ran into yesterday in court, is still the highest ranked "candidate." The sad Republican Party rankings:

• Chris Christie- 11.5%
• Jeb Bush- 10.8%
• Rand Paul- 10.3%
• Paul Ryan- 9.3%
• Ted Cruz- 8.8%
• Rick Perry- 8.3%
• Marco Rubio- 7.5%
• Scott Walker (losing his reelection battle and also facing a possible indictment)- 5.3%
• Rick Santorum (perennial crackpot candidate)- 2.8%
• Bobby Jindal- 2.3%

Top GOP Establishment financiers from the Northeast look at that list and get sick to their stomachs-- and they're the ones who are serious about persuading Mitt Romney to give jot another go. One political scientist referred to the top Republican contenders as "the Seven Dwarfs without Snow White." Larry Sabato says the whole field is nothing but a bunch of second and third tier hopefuls. "For once, the GOP has no one who is arguably next-in-line-- no crown prince-- which is the way the party prefers to approach presidential nominations. Just as important, this is a party badly divided and riven by factionalism."

Sabato contends that Bush, the son of former President George H.W. Bush and the brother of former President George W. Bush, has the makings of a front-runner and the anointed “Establishment candidate” if he decides to run.

However,  Bush would not be a shoe-in by any means, because he polls poorly among his party’s hard-core conservatives and has alienated many with his support of liberal immigration reform policies and the unpopular Common Core educational initiative. What’s more, his wife reportedly doesn’t want him to run.

“Bush has done absolutely nothing to suggest that he’s truly interested in taking on the campaign,” Sabato wrote.

Not so fast, Last night, the Wall Street Journal made the case that Jeb is sending out signals that he's interested in going up against Hillary. "Republican strategists and fundraisers," they reported, "say Jeb Bush's closest advisers have been quietly spreading the word that they should avoid committing to other possible presidential candidates until he decides on his own course after the November election."

Jim Nicholson, a Bush supporter who served in President George W. Bush's cabinet, said: "I think the chances are better than 50-50 that he runs, and that is based on some conversations I've had with members of the Bush family."

…Bush is a top choice of the establishment wing of the Republican Party. His entry would help define the policy fights of the primary process, as his support for overhauling immigration law and for the Common Core national educational standards has drawn strong opposition from many conservatives.

…Mike Feldman, an aide on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, said both Mr. Bush and likely Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would campaign with tremendous advantages-- and baggage-- due to their families' long political history.

"Both of them would have to wrestle with the trade-offs involved in emphasizing their considerable experience and presenting a vision for the future while having to defend their records and litigating the past," he said.

…Attention among some in the GOP returned to Mitt Romney, the party's nominee in 2012, who has said he is "not running,'' but has allowed that "circumstances can change.'' Messrs. Bush and Romney would compete for a similar set of fundraisers and political hands.

Many donors are both looking for a signal of intent from Mr. Bush but also are happy to stay on the sidelines until after the midterm elections, when the field will start to crystallize. For them, Mr. Bush's indecision is helpful.

"It's frozen the field a bit, in that it's a convenient excuse for finance people to stay neutral and wait to commit," said Republican strategist Dave Carney, a top adviser to Rick Perry's 2012 campaign who worked in the White House for George W. Bush.

"It's not like Jeb would walk into the race and clear the field, but his gravitas and fundraising network makes him a first-class competitor," Mr. Carney said.

In addition to keeping potential donors and supporters on deck, Mr. Bush is taking other steps that typically precede a presidential campaign: traveling the country, engaging in public policy debates and raising money for his party.

A newly established fundraising committee allows him to funnel donations from his financial backers to GOP candidates key to winning a majority in the U.S. Senate.

Mr. Bush is slated to headline a Sept. 23 event in Tampa that organizers hope will raise as much as $1 million for GOP Senate candidates Cory Gardner in Colorado, Joni Ernst in Iowa, Monica Wehby in Oregon, Tom Cotton in Arkansas and Dan Sullivan in Alaska. A Bush aide said the goal was $500,000.

The host committee of more than three dozen people is expected to form the backbone of a finance committee should Mr. Bush run for president. Chairmen include John Rood, a real-estate developer and the former ambassador to the Bahamas; Al Hoffman, a real-estate developer and former Republican National Committee finance chairman; and John Kirtley, a school-choice proponent and the co-founder of the KLH Capital investment firm.

My own best guess is that in the end, the GOP Establishment will realize that nothing will stop America's yen for another go-round with a Clinton and they'll nominate Ted Cruz, let him take the fall for a landslide debacle and hope to get back to "normalcy" in 2020 or 2024. His Tea Party allies are busy huffing and puffing in their attempts to eviscerate his rivals and this week they turned their guns on hapless moron, Rick Perry. One Cruz booster, Keli Carender, the national grassroots coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, has been referring to Perry-- and not incorrectly, as normal Americans have known for many years-- as a "complete imbecile." The latest anti-Perry brouhaha is because he hired 3 operatives anathema to the far right fringe groups who hold some sway over the GOP base, even if the Chamber of Commerce wing has been kicking its ass all cycle. Henry Barbour, former Bill Clinton aide Mark Fabiani, and McCain-Palin campaign chief and MSNBC pundit Steve Schmidt are part of Team Perry… and the teabaggers are ready for war.

“The only two options are that Rick Perry is a complete imbecile and he has no idea who these people are and what they’ve done and how the conservative base—who votes in primaries—feels about these guys, or he’s doing it on purpose because that’s the kind of message he wants to send,” said Keli Carender, the national grassroots coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. Either way, she assured: “It will be an issue. We will make it an issue.”

Barbour is already working on Perry’s 2016 bid for the White House. But conservatives know him best for his role running the political action committee Mississippi Conservatives, founded by his uncle, Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi. In this year’s Magnolia State primary fight-- and “fight” is an understatement-- between U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran and state Sen. Chris McDaniel, Barbour reportedly played an influential and controversial role. According to National Review, his PAC funneled money to produce ads against McDaniel that alleged he would set back “race relationships between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups.” The ads, which seemed intended to drive African-American voters to the polls, enraged McDaniel’s Tea Party supporters.

As reported by Breitbart News, some conservatives loathe Barbour so much that they tried to get the Republican National Committee to censure him, to no avail.

“Republicans should not hire Henry Barbour unless and until he apologizes for the tactics he helped fund in Mississippi...I don’t think [keeping Barbour around] necessarily means Perry is endorsing what he did, but it means he’s certainly not properly condemning it or taking it seriously enough,” Quin Hillyer, a conservative writer and activist, told the Daily Beast. “What he helped finance was so far beyond the pale that he should be blackballed by conservatives, and if Perry wants to be considered a conservative, he should no longer employ Henry Barbour.”

Rick Shaftan, a Republican consultant who involved himself in the Mississippi primary, offered a somewhat different view of Barbour to the Daily Beast: “I don’t like what he did in Mississippi, but you know what? It shows he’s a ruthless, cutthroat operative, and there’s something to be said for that on the Republican side. Because we don’t have enough of them. If the force of evil can be brought to do good, then that’s a good thing.”

Normally, staffers don’t matter much to voters, Carender noted. But Mississippi is different for many on the far right. It’s become the ultimate test of Tea Party fidelity, a measuring stick for whether a conservative will sell out his principles to inside-the-Beltway Washington RINOs or will stay true to the cause and the grassroots activists who are the heart and soul of the movement.

People don’t recognize, Carender said, just “how plugged in the conservative base is to Mississippi…If you’re a man of integrity, you don’t associate with Henry Barbour as far as we’re concerned.”

…Perry also has hired Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and former consultant to John McCain in 2008. Schmidt has long enraged Tea Party conservatives with his candor about members of his own party. Schmidt has called McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin, “someone [who] was nominated to the vice presidency who was manifestly unprepared to take the oath of office should it become necessary and as it has become necessary many times in American history.” Asked whether Palin would have a future in politics, Schmidt once remarked: “I hope not...And the reason I say that is because if you look at it, over the last four years, all of the deficiencies in knowledge, all of the deficiencies in preparedness, she’s done not one thing to rectify them, to correct them.”

Then Schmidt described Palin’s unflattering qualities, which could, unfortunately for Perry, double as descriptions for most members of the Tea Party: “She has become a person who, I think, is filled with grievance, filled with anger, who has a divisive message for the national stage...”

Conservative radio host Mark Levin wondered of Schmidt, “Why would Perry hire this conservative attacker and Palin hater?”

Schmidt made those comments on MSNBC, where he is employed as a political analyst. Shaftan said of Perry hiring the strategist: “If they have Steve Schmidt working for them, why are they telling people? That I don’t understand.”

Perry has been basking in the glory of the conservative credibility his fight with Texas Democrats has lent him-- so much so that his mugshot features a prominent smirk, one you can wear on a T-shirt being sold by his PAC for just $25. Some Republicans made that same image their Facebook profile pictures in a show of support, in the way some do for gay marriage, or to end violence against children. But you’re only as good as the company you keep, according to some members of the far right who have in the past proved themselves to be loud enough to get their way.

Conservative HQ columnist Richard Viguerie wrote of Perry’s team: “When you hire a consultant, you hire his reputation, strategy, and tactics. We doubt that Governor Perry plans to win the Republican presidential nomination by race-baiting, recruiting Democrats to vote in Republican primary elections, and trashing as ‘poisonous’ conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh…”

Hillyer agreed: “A very important law of politics and government, as emphasized again and again by conservative movement leader Morton Blackwell, is that personnel is policy. If somebody wants to get a sense of how a political leader might govern, it certainly is important to see who he hires.”

2 guys with very serious dad problems