The Washington Post shares the story of an apparent meeting of the minds that occurred in January of last year before anyone officially declared their candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination and before Mitt Romney ultimately decided not to run.
According to Romney, he spoke to Jeb Bush and essentially told him there's no way he could beat Hillary Clinton.
Romney also said he confronted Bush with his fears about his candidacy: “Jeb, to be very honest, I think it’s very hard for you to post up against Hillary Clinton and to separate yourself from the difficulty of the W. years and compare them with the Clinton years.” He said Bush responded by saying that “he was going to make his campaign about the future, not about the past.”
“I didn’t say anything at that point,” Romney recalled. “But as he left, I said to myself, ‘Gosh, in my opinion, it’s not going to be as easy to make that separation as I think he gives the impression it will be.’ One of the few things I predicted that turned out to be true.”
I would say Romney was only half right.
It's true Jeb Bush cannot defeat Hillary Clinton, but he won't even make it that far. Unless something extraordinarily dramatic occurs over the next few weeks, Jeb Bush is not going to be the Republican nominee and he'll never face Hillary Clinton.
Jeb, who is an enormous sucker, responded to the Washington Post story this morning by citing his brother's popularity.
In a phone interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Bush responded to concerns Romney recently told The Washington Post that he'd aired to him during a private January 2015 conversation.
“We talked about the campaign ‘cause he was thinking about running and I went out to see him,” Bush recalled. “I wanted him to know that I was all in and had a plan to win this, and I still do. But my brother—if you did the polling and actually looked at it, he’s probably the most popular president amongst Republicans in this country."
The only reason George W. Bush is as popular as he is now is because he hasn't been in office since 2008.
We've also reached the point now where Republicans believe things about George W. Bush that aren't true in the same manner that they believe things about Ronald Reagan that aren't true. As awful as he was, even George W. Bush was not the raving conservative today's Republican party represents but plenty GOP voters have that incorrect image in their minds.
They believe he did things that he didn't do, and they believe he didn't do things that he did, in fact, do.
And Jeb Bush is no George Bush. Jeb Bush as the personality of a raw potato.