Following the anticipated failure of "Jeb can fix it," the Bush braintrust is reportedly considering their next major reboot.
The massive amount of money behind the Jeb! campaign may be redirected to attack other candidates and ignore Donald Trump.
Mike Murphy, the Los Angeles-based ad man running Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC, isn’t about to leave the $75 million left in the group’s bank account unspent and is readying a 15-minute biographical film about Bush.
According to another source close to Right to Rise, Murphy has been floating another tactical shift to potential supporters, suggesting that he might spend the bulk of the $75 million to carpet bomb Rubio, Cruz, Carson, Chris Christie — everyone but Trump. The thinking: Making the race into a binary choice between Bush and Trump might be the only way a majority of primary voters go with Bush.
I know reboots and sequels typically far better than original films, but I'm not convinced that will be the case this time.
The latter portion of their plan makes a certain amount of sense to me, but the former does not. No one wants or needs to see a short film about Jeb Bush. This is not 1996 nor is it even 2008. Modern GOP voters don't care as much about your biography as they do your ability to embody every terrible comment section on the internet.
Poetic scenes of Jeb Bush buttering his toast set against a backdrop of wind-swept wheat fields and wild horses isn't going to deliver the kind of the shot in the arm the Jeb! campaign needs. In fact, the last time they tried that the campaign accidentally used footage of school children, construction workers, and the amber waves of grain shot in other countries.
Eliminating the competition and turning the race into a "binary choice" between Trump and Jeb may have worked if that was their strategy from the beginning, but I think it's too little too late. There's not a great deal of time left for Jeb! to prove me wrong.