The Ghost Of Bushie Future

The Romney Country Club wing of the GOP is getting very, very nervous about not having anyone who isn't completely insane in 2016 to try to stop Hillary Clinton.  To that effect, they're taking a page from the Clinton playbook and running the fundraising numbers on drafting Jeb Bush.

Many of the Republican Party’s most powerful insiders and financiers have begun a behind-the-scenes campaign to draft former Florida governor Jeb Bush into the 2016 presidential race, courting him and his intimates and starting talks on fundraising strategy.

Concerned that the George Washington Bridge traffic scandal has damaged New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s political standing and alarmed by the steady rise of Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), prominent donors, conservative leaders and longtime operatives say they consider Bush the GOP’s brightest hope to win back the White House.

Bush’s advisers insist that he is not actively exploring a candidacy and will not make a decision until at least the end of this year. But over the past few weeks, Bush hastraveled the country delivering policy speeches, campaigning for Republicans ahead of the fall midterm elections, honing messages on income inequality and foreign policy, and cultivating ties with wealthy benefactors — all signals that he is considering a run.

Many if not most of Mitt Romney’s major donors are reaching out to Bush and his confidants with phone calls, e-mails and invitations to meet, according to interviews with 30 senior Republicans. One bundler estimated that the “vast majority” of Romney’s top 100 donors would back Bush in a competitive nomination fight.

“He’s the most desired candidate out there,” said another bundler, Brian Ballard, who sat on the national finance committees for Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. “Everybody that I know is excited about it.”

The same geniuses who gave us Johnny Volcano and Mister Forty-Seven Percent are now betting their billions on Jebbie.  And he'd have even more baggage than the two of them combined, with his brother's failures, his father's failures, and his own myriad of screw-ups as governor of Florida, starting with charter schools and Stand Your Ground.

The Screeching Shamnesty crowd will never accept him either, and the GOP's only remotely useful argument "Can America really afford another Clinton in the White House?" evaporates the second Jeb Bush gets involved and reminds all the voters of the recessions, depressions and economic destruction the last two of them caused.

Over on the other side of the fence, Jazz Shaw asks an important question involving Jeb:

But in order for this next primary cycle to play out according to the preordained script, we have to have a big, conventional wisdom, establishment candidate to face down the grassroots upstarts, right? And if turns out that Christie is damaged goods and it’s not Bush, then who would it be?

Good question.  Not a whole lot of candidates left for the big money wing who aren't already also-rans from 2008 and 2012.  There's a reason why Jeb was passed over twice.