I don't think they'd be giving this speech if it gave people the warm and fuzzies, there's probably a significant number of people out there who hear the word 'socialist' and don't understand the difference between socialist and democratic socialist and that's a barrier for them.

Mo Elleithee

Categorized in : Politics

They don't need a breakthrough moment at this point, they need an infrastructure — so that when he does have a breakthrough moment, he can capitalize on it and sustain it.

Unless he crosses a line, I doubt it hurts him. On some level, he wants to be careful, he promises to be something to be different, at a certain point he can take it too far and look like everyone else.

If you thought George Bush's foreign policy made the world less safe, then you're going to really hate Jeb Bush's approach, even with the benefit of hindsight, he's one of the few people left who still stands by the decision to rush into a war in Iraq based on false information, even when it took resources away from the hunt for al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And he's made it pretty clear that if he had his way, we'd still be in Iraq and staying there indefinitely.

Out of that meeting we came home with these boxes that have been sitting in a back room at the Florida Democratic Party offices, that's just old Jeb Bush material. No one else has this material.

It's not about finding a silver bullet, if we find one, great, we'll be ready. But campaigns aren't won or lost all the time with a 'macaca' moment or a Todd Akin moment. What we're focused on is just connecting the dots in order to tell a story about each of these folks, hold them accountable for their records, and make sure that voters understand the other side and their real record.

We're the only ones who can actually communicate with the eventual nominee, and we're really the ones who are going to help define who the Republican candidates are long before we have a nominee, but once we do, we'll be working hand and glove with them to make sure that the work that we've been doing for the past couple of years is helpful to their eventual campaign.

I don't know what the difference is between 'thinking about' running and 'actively exploring' running, but I suspect it has a lot to do with keeping his name in the news, however you see it, there's no parsing this simple fact: Jeb Bush has fully embraced the failed economic agenda that benefits only a select few at the expense of the middle class. That's not going to change no matter how many different ways he says he may run.

Every now and then we've got a moment where we can take stock of where we are as a party and as a country and make adjustments, this is one of those moments. Not four years from now. Now.