Salon: Jeb Bush and what the GOP really thinks about 2012

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Friday, Jan 7, 2011 10:01 ET
Jeb Bush and what the GOP really thinks about 2012
By Steve Kornacki

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/01/07/jeb_bush_obama



The unusually productive lame duck session of Congress that wrapped up just before Christmas, I wrote at the time, symbolized how much our political culture has learned from 1994, when Democrats were hit with a midterm drubbing almost identical to the one they suffered this past fall.

That '94 debacle, at least initially, terrified Bill Clinton and his fellow Democrats into a state of paralysis. Sixteen years later, though, Barack Obama simply acknowledged the "shellacking," went back to work, and soon found himself signing the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" and extracting an unexpected $300 billion in stimulus through a compromise with Republicans. No one was seriously questioning his relevance as president, and even conservatives were willing to concede that his odds of winning reelection in 2012 were still pretty good, despite the massive midterm losses.

The difference, of course, is that everyone in politics today is familiar with the story of Clinton's fairly rapid post-'94 recovery. They know better than to write off Obama, who actually scores slightly better in polling now than Clinton did at this same point in his presidency.

I bring this all up because it's the first thing I thought about earlier this week when news broke that Jeb Bush isn't ruling out running for president ... in 2016. Of course, there won't be a Republican nomination for Bush to pursue in '16 if a Republican unseats Obama in '12, but what was striking about his comments and the reaction they generated is that no one seemed too hung up on this point. The contrast to late '94 and early '95 is striking. Back then, if a major Republican ruled out running for the presidency in 1996, no one was interested in speculating on whether that Republican might simply be waiting to run in 2000. Clinton, everyone knew, was a dead man walking. If you were a major Republican and you aspired to the presidency, you would have to run in 1996; to sit the race out would be to give up on the White House for good.

[Parche]

1. gawd

i cant stand looking at ferret face jeb......:grr:

[sadbear]

2. Yep, they know they don't have a snowball's chance in hell in '12