It’s “impossible” to see Jeb Bush’s campaign position itself to win, former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote on Friday after the latest Republican presidential debate.
“I speak of his candidacy in the past tense, which is rude though I don’t mean it rudely,” Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column. “It’s just hard to see how this can work. By hard I mean, for me, impossible.”
At the last debate on Wednesday, Bush was widely perceived to have been bested by Marco Rubio, a fellow Floridian, after Bush criticized him for missing votes in the U.S. Senate while running for president.
“When you signed up for this, this was a six-year term and you should be showing up to work,” Bush said.
Rubio, slightly ahead of Bush in national polls, appeared ready for the moment and fired back, telling Bush that the only reason he was on the offense was because “someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”
Bush never seemed to recover from the blow for the remainder of the event.
In the column, which was headlined, “The Not Ready for Prime Time Bush,” Noonan wrote, “He has not succeeded this year, and there is no particular reason to believe he will. Yes, he still has money, but what has money got him so far?”
Leading up to Bush’s announcement that he would run, national polls showed him as the party front-runner. But he fell to a distant second after Donald Trump jumped into the race and then fell even further behind after delivering lackluster debate performances.
Bush is currently polling nationally in fifth place, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Rubio is in third.
