“I‘m still for him,” says an adviser to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, “but it hasn’t gone very well so far, and we’ve got to face that. It’s going to take some remedying.”
The remedying began Monday with word that Bush has shaken up his campaign before the campaign has even been formally announced. The Bush team sent out word that Danny Diaz, a respected, hard-charging Republican operative, will become the campaign’s manager instead of Bush’s original choice, the highly thought-of Iowa strategist David Kochel, who will move to another senior position in the campaign.
Bush aides insisted it’s not a shakeup — “Nobody has left and nobody new is coming!” said one, via email. But it’s a shakeup.
The move comes amid bewilderment and disappointment among some Republicans who saw Bush as the natural leader of the GOP race. When word broke, a veteran party strategist recalled meeting recently with Republican donors who had become increasingly unhappy with the Bush effort.
“They [the donors] said that in January, Bush laid out a scenario of where he would be by now, and it has not remotely happened,” the operative recalled. “They said the plan was for Bush to use this period to emerge as frontrunner, and launch as decisive frontrunner with the model, interestingly enough, being George W. Bush in 1999. But that hasn’t happened, obviously, and I expect this bloodletting is to show that they are aware and trying to take steps to address.”
The move comes with the Republican field, Bush included, in an extraordinarily tight bunch. In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, six candidates — Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, and Mike Huckabee — are all within 2.5 points of each other at the front of the pack. That tightness owes to several factors, like Walker’s continued strength and Rubio’s surge. But the biggest reason for it is Bush’s failure to take control of the race.
Back in January, Bush stood nearly six points ahead of his nearest rival in the RealClearPolitics average. Now, he’s just another candidate in an expanding first tier. Yes, it is still early, and yes, there is a long way to go, but that is not where Bush planned to be at this moment.
The situation puts pressure on Bush’s planned formal unveiling of his candidacy in Miami next Monday. “His announcement is going to be seen as more important than others because he’s been a little flat,” says the adviser. “I don’t think his support has ruptured, but I think there are an awful lot of supporters out there who have asked, ‘What’s the deal here?’ If he has a good announcement, a lot of that will go away.”
Perhaps. Diaz is known for his communications skills, getting a candidate’s message out in the super-fast and super-heated environment of today’s campaigns. In announcing the changes, top Bush adviser Sally Bradshaw suggested that’s why he was chosen. “Danny’s skill at rapidly moving content and campaign organization makes him perfectly suited for running the day-to-day operations,” Bradshaw said.
Certainly Bush could use it. More than a few observers were baffled by his halting, multi-day response to the question of whether he would have ordered the invasion of Iraq, knowing what he knows today. While a single episode won’t sink a campaign, it shook supporters’ confidence in Bush’s ability to handle future setbacks.
Diaz, the hope goes, will address problems like that much more quickly and decisively. But even if Diaz proves to be the greatest rapid communicator in the world, there will still be more basic questions involved in the Bush candidacy.
Like this: “He hasn’t been able to break out from this notion that he’s the third Bush,” says the adviser. “And he’s got to.”
That is a fundamental problem for the Bush campaign, given some voters’ reluctance to elect a third Bush to the White House. In the end, it’s a problem that might not be fixable. But if there is a solution, it will have to come from Bush himself, and not from a rearranged staff.
