Jeb!’s got a problem
by digby
I wrote about Jeb’s struggle explaining what the hell happened with Iraq today for Salon. Here’s an excerpt:
The question is whether this issue is salient enough to hurt Jeb in the primaries. There are those, like liberal columnist Eugene Robinson who correctly observe that however much Jeb desires to cast off the smothering cloak of his brother’s very recent failed record, his policy statements indicate that it’s only campaign talk:
Bush says “we do not need … a major commitment” of American ground troops in Iraq or Syria to fight against the Islamic State — at least for now. But he proposes embedding U.S. soldiers and Marines with Iraqi units, which basically means leading them into battle. He proposes much greater support for Kurdish forces, which are loath to fight in the Sunni heartlands where the Islamic State holds sway. And he wants the establishment of no-fly zones and safe havens in Syria, as a way to battle both the Islamic State and dictator Bashar al-Assad.That all sounds like a “major commitment” of something. And none of it addresses the fundamental problem in Iraq, which George W. Bush also failed to grasp: the lack of political reconciliation among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. Bush 43’s vaunted “surge” was a Band-Aid that masked, but did not heal, this underlying wound.
This piece by Peter Beinert about the vaunted “surge” spells out the details of that to which Robinson alludes. Jeb (like all the other Republican candidates) pretends that Iraq was a rousing success, and everyone was living together in peace and harmony until the evil team of Obama/Clinton blew it all up. This, of course, could not be further from the truth.
But this piece by Phillip Bump of the Washington Post blog The Fix, suggests this may not be the problem we might assume it would be, at least not on the Republican side of aisle:
There hasn’t been a lot of recent polling on the public perception of the Iraq War, but there has been some. And that polling suggests that — especially in a Republican primary election — the war is not the toxic topic that it was in 2008.In June, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal included support for the Iraq War in a long list of questions about how people would view candidates who held particular positions. For 64 percent of respondents, having backed the Iraq War either didn’t affect their view of the candidate or made them view the candidate more favorably.More telling is a survey the same month from Gallup. The polling agency compared the number of people who said the war was a mistake in February 2014 to the percentage saying that now, and broke out the results by party. Both Democrats and independents were more likely to say that the war wasn’t a mistake than in the past — but only 31 percent of Republicans thought it was a mistake at all. Leaving 69 percent with either no opinion or a favorable one. In a 17-person race, support from 69 percent of the electorate is surely more than welcome.
It was inevitable that the Republicans would find a way to make peace with the catastrophe in Iraq. They like war and they passionately backed that one at the time. It’s very hard to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of having pushed that hard for war when forced to recognize the failure that followed. So, instead, they are rewriting history to show it as a thrilling victory that was reversed by the inexplicable decision by President Obama to bring the troops home. That’s the kind of thinking that works for them.
In my opinion, Bush has problems with the base, but I’d guess it has more to do with his membership in the family that continuously embarrasses them. They don’t like having to make excuses for their leadership. (And they have to do it so often.) It’s also a matter of his lackluster personality. The Republicans are looking for a crusading partisan warrior this time out, someone who will carry their banner both domestically and internationally. Jeb Bush is a hardcore conservative, but he just doesn’t deliver a punch with any passion. Perhaps they’ll settle for him when all is said and done. But he doesn’t get their blood pumping and they really want someone who does.
Bush’s real Iraq problem comes in the general. If Clinton gets the nod, he will throw her war vote in her face and try to tie the chaos that exists there to her. And most Republicans will buy it. But it’s hard to imagine that 50 percent plus 1 of this country will not see Jeb and think of that horrible period after 9/11 when the government invaded a country that had nothing to do with it. It’s very hard for any Republican to get past the party’s association with a blunder of that magnitude — it’s impossible for a man whose last name is Bush.
And it sure seems as though somewhere deep down inside, Jeb knows it.
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