Bush Follows a Harder but Happier Path

New York Times

By John Harwood

April 10, 2015

Bush Follows a Harder but Happier Path

For a Republican presidential front-runner, Jeb Bush boasts a notable array of vulnerabilities.

His father and brother were both deeply unpopular when they left their presidencies. Thirteen years after his last campaign, the former Florida governor is out of practice as an orator.

On immigration and education, he clings to positions that outrage Tea Party conservatives. Despite the huge campaign treasury that his aides are building, no Republican prospect has stepped aside in deference to him — not even his onetime Florida protégé, Senator Marco Rubio.

Yet Mr. Bush appears at peace with his obstacles. And whether or not he clears them over the next year, he is charting the path forward for his party.

On the presidential stage, Republicans have grown as rusty as Mr. Bush. They began an ascent to White House dominance as George H.W. Bush was becoming a national figure in the late 1970s. The elder Mr. Bush’s 1992 re-election defeat punctuated the end of that era.

George W. Bush’s two terms interrupted the new period of Democratic advantage. But they didn’t arrest the cultural and demographic shifts that keep shrinking the ranks of white conservatives on which Republicans overwhelmingly rely.

White voters cast 88 percent of the ballots in the presidential election won by Ronald Reagan in 1980, but just 72 percent when Barack Obama won a second term in 2012. Republican strategists acknowledge that in their policies, tone and rhetoric, they haven’t adapted their appeals to the Latino, Asian and African-American voters whose ranks have swelled.

“The uncomfortable reality is that Republicans have a worn-out business model for the 21st century electorate,” the pollster Whit Ayres writes in his new book “2016 and Beyond.” Republicans cannot compete for the presidency, he argues, until their candidates back immigration proposals permitting legal status for undocumented residents, shun “ideological rigidity,” embrace nontraditional families and pursue minority voters.

Candidates have spent much of the opening phase of the 2016 Republican nomination race running in the opposite direction, after conservative voters. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mr. Bush’s closest national competitor, has abandoned his previous support for a path to citizenship for undocumented residents.

Mr. Walker and other contenders have renounced the national “Common Core” education standards that have drawn the Tea Party’s ire. Most of the Republican field has signed the no-tax-increase pledge circulated by veteran antitax activist Grover G. Norquist.

Mr. Bush has refused to sign the pledge. He has declared that “there is no plan to deport 11 million people” now in the country illegally. And defending his support for the Common Core in Iowa, he said, “I know what I believe.”

All three stances follow Mr. Bush’s assertion that Republicans must risk losing favor with primary voters to reach the more expansive audience that decides general elections.

The risk is real. His campaign treasury can help shield him from attacks. So can his record in Florida, where he cut taxes, overhauled public education, eliminated racial preferences in higher education and stood with the religious right in the end-of-life case involving Terri Schiavo, one of his constituents.

But a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed more Republicans nationally open to backing Mr. Walker and Mr. Rubio. Iowa surveys show him trailing Mr. Walker and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor.

Mr. Bush’s path has never proved as clear as some observers, including in his own family, had expected. His 1994 defeat for Florida governor seared him professionally and personally.

He left the Episcopal Church for the Catholicism of his Mexican-born wife, Columba. In his successful 1998 race, he displayed the softer, more welcoming style now on display for the nation.

“He has become very comfortable in his own skin,” said Sally Bradshaw, his closest aide for years. The veteran New Hampshire political reporter James Pindell concluded recently that Mr. Bush’s demeanor is “completely different” from other candidates in terms of his sense of ease.

“Jeb Bush is zen,” Mr. Pindell wrote.

A year ago, Mr. Bush posed a question about his potential candidacy: “Can I do it joyfully?” Win or lose, he seems to have settled on the answer as yes.

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