What was that noise? Sounded like the rustle of a handsome check?
Dirty tricks with illegal centers make for great made-for-TV movies.
As Nixon discovered to his cost, they tend to backfire spectacularly when there’s not a screenwriter in charge to contain the damage.
That he needs the NRA vote.
Yeah its not that “Jeb! forgot to renew it” its that Jeb! was never using that domain name to begin with. Still its smart campaigning on Trumps part making his opponent look like an idiot for the cost of buying a new domain name. Wayback machine has snapshots from October 2015 for Jebbush.com but looks like it was just parked with a blank page. I’d bet someone registered it in october and just sold it Trump for a couple thousand dollars or more, given that Trump keeps telling us how rich he is.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150929075801/http://jebbush.com/
This is such a massive unforced error it’s pathological. It’s less like a baseball player missing an easy catch and more like a player not even attempting to catch a ball that’s coming right at them. It’s enough to make observers suspect some kind of mental damage.
I’m not saying Jeb is brain-damaged. I’m sure he’s reasonably intelligent. I’m also not saying any specific individual on Jeb’s staff is less than intelligent. I mean the campaign as a whole, the campaign seen as a collective entity with an overall herd intelligence, is not all there. The domain name should have been snapped up before most people even knew who Jeb Bush was. This isn’t 1996, and even in 1996 people made jokes about how poor old Bob Dole was desperately out-of-touch compared to the young and dynamic Clinton campaign.
The fact nobody was on the stick enough to prevent this means Jeb’s establishment backing isn’t enough. He has mountains of money and long lists of endorsements and he’s still totally unprepared. He has no plan beyond Be Bush, and I can’t tell if that’s his entitlement showing or his party’s.
Clinton’s current social media campaign is a laughing stock. remember this?
Bernie and Trump are both killing it on social media, and especially Bernie has a huge presence on reddit where there sub-reddits for each state helping to organise volunteers.
Yeah, the Clinton campaign hasn’t gotten off to a great start, and Clinton herself has a perception problem to overcome, which she’s actively made worse with that idiocy from Paglia and the rest of her “adult women support Clinton” nonsense.
Sanders is way more popular on most of Reddit than Trump. He has a lot of support among young, white progressives. The problem he has is expanding his support to literally anyone else.
They said much the same about Labour and the Tories last year and look who won.
Jeb! is from the days when there were a few big networks and big newspapers, and that was the whole of mass media. Talk radio seems to lend itself to screaming right wingers, not really a media battlefield there. And ok, cable, but much of that had no commercials. Anyway, in the old days, a wealthy candidate could flood “the mass media” with their message, people didn’t have other sources of information, and so we’d end up with Reagans and Bushes who only knew how to cut taxes, jack up the debt in an effort to destroy Social Security, start wars and generally screw the middle (and especially lower) class.
Now nobody can fully control the media, and it matters to connect with people who are often cross-referencing what you say with comments from highly informed citizens. Simply repeating the heartless hard-right party line isn’t going to resonate with most people anymore, it just isn’t the only message people are getting.
Bush can’t adapt. He must not realize how he looks on TV. And his message is stale. Trump has a lot of experience in media, and I think that is 3/4 of his advantage. But look! Frontrunner that he is, even Trump’s message is widely panned outside the GOP base. The GOP top-down, screw everybody approach just doesn’t sell in this new communications environment.
It’s also the legacy of the family name. While most Republicans SAY they like the Bushes, not many are interested in doing that again. If Jeb wasn’t a Bush, I think he’d be doing about as well as Kasich is doing. At this point, he’s doing worse.
So he’d be merely a loser instead of a laughingstock.
If Jeb wasn’t a Bush he would never have been Governor of Florida and he wouldn’t be a candidate for President.
[quote=“adaher, post:530, topic:722672”]
It’s also the legacy of the family name. While most Republicans SAY they like the Bushes, not many are interested in doing that again. If Jeb wasn’t a Bush, I think he’d be doing about as well as Kasich is doing. At this point, he’s doing worse. [\quote]The irony is that nearly every GOP candidate’s proposals are nearly identical to those of W. They are all, after all, owned by the same entities. That GOP voters don’t seem to grasp this is a constant source of amazement.
The irony is that nearly every GOP candidate’s proposals are nearly identical to those of W. They are all, after all, owned by the same entities. That GOP voters don’t seem to grasp this is a constant source of amazement.
True, but assuming that he made it that far on his own merits, he would be a credible Presidential candidate but in this environment would still fall short. He just wouldn’t be having such an embarrassing performance.
The irony is that nearly every GOP candidate’s proposals are nearly identical to those of W. They are all, after all, owned by the same entities. That GOP voters don’t seem to grasp this is a constant source of amazement.
@Try2BComprehensive: There seems to be an echo in here this afternoon. 
Agreed.
By contrast: HRC in 2008 and in 2016 was/is also a dynastic heir apparent. We all know how 2008 turned out, and she may or may not fare any better this time. Time will tell.
But I think on the basics both times she’s managed to run a competent campaign backed up by legit policies. Left-leaning ones of course, but legit within that intellectual / political tradition.
Jeb? Not so much.
But, neither has anyone else on the Pub side, hardly. In the GOP, it just doesn’t seem to be a year for competent campaigning, nor for policies at all, and certainly not for policies legit within the American conservative tradition. William F. Buckley must be spinning in his grave.
Quite. Even a competent campaigner couldn’t sell conventional Republicanism to the current right-leaning populace. At least not over the din of Trump, Cruz, & Fox.
Despite people here saying many times that Jeb has plenty of money, Red State is reporting he’s basically broke.