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Three Time luck is something that is hard to come by. Just ask all the horses that have lost their bid for a triple Crown on the race track at Belmont between Affirmed almost 40 years ago, and America's favorite, American Pharoah, who finally did it. But as hard as a threepeat in on the race track, in politics, and in running for president, it has never before happened three members of the same immediate family won the presidency of the United States.
But who ever called the Bush family normal? Or a family that couldn't beat the odds? Well, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, thinks be can be the first one to do it. Moments ago he announced he's actually doing it-he's running for president.
The original idea of Jeb's non campaign, (he has really been running for a while now, and his announcement today surprised absolutely no one) was to scare everyone away. And nobody ran and hid under their political beds. In fact, since Bush first started toying with the idea of running. In fact, Jeb's "scare them so bad they don't even try" has worked so well we now have historically loaded field of candidates. Jeb is only the eleventh one to announce, and tomorrow Donald Trump will make an announcement of some king as Trump Tower.
Besides his name, which apparently is not scaring away candidates, but is helping Jeb raise money and keep from getting elbowed to the bottom of the pack, Bush's other thing he seems to be relying on his is stability, (in contrast to the likes of Donald Trump,) his seriousness as a candidate, (no one truly believes George Pataki will last very long) and his outreach towards Latino voters, a group which many Republicans have had a hard time getting. Bush's announcement speech itself was held at Miami Dade College, which claims to be the most diverse in the nation, it also has the largest Hispanic student body in America.
Bush however, will have difficulty in gaining the support of the far right of the Republican Party. While in a general election that will not hurt him too badly, the Republicans always end of voting for the candidate, in the GOP Primary, because those that turn out for that are historically more likely to be white, better off economically, and more conservative, and that is just the base that could kill Bush in the run for the wire.
Bush was expected to be the favorite of the elite. And yet in-the-know political bloggers like Nate Cohn say that not only is Bush falling short of the massive amounts of money from former Bush donors that he and everyone else expected, but even the staffers of the two Georges are not running to him. And to top all of that off, outside of his home state, Bush has received no endorsements. Not a single one. And even their support is mixed. Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida and who is considered Jeb's prodigy, is not only not supporting Bush, he's actually running against him.
And beyond all of that bad news, it just keeps getting worse. On the campaign trail last month Jeb was asked a simple question about Iraq. And it took a week to answer it, in the meantime, he had lots of different answers he gave. Early on, Jeb was concerned about distinguishing himself from his father and brother, (neither was at the announcement speech) but one pundit joked that Jeb finally had-when his brother said something, he stuck to it. Jeb didn't.
Editorially, I do not believe Jeb Bush is a great choice for the Republican Party. He has been hypocritical in his attacks on Hillary Clinton, bashing her on money laws, and then avoiding campaign finance laws himself.
The simple and painful truth about Jeb is that he is a man who has not been in office for over a decade, he is the former governor of Florida for two terms. If his last name were not Bush, we never would have heard of him, and he wouldn't be running for president. And no horse has ever won a race based on his name. Just ask that horse Recapture the Glory. Trying to do for his owners what Bush is trying now to do for his family. And the horse did run in the Kentucky Derby, and lost...badly.
Andrew C. Abbott
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