The article itself requires a registration/subscription to read, but the pertinent parts lay out the (correct) analysis:
"The strangest advertisements in recent US political history may have been a set of billboards that appeared in early 2010. They showed former president George W Bush goofily waving next to the question: 'Miss me yet?'...it was unclear whether the signs had been paid for by an earnest Bush supporter or a Bush hater with a dark sense of humour...
Lately, though, certain Republican party donors have come to believe there exists a widespread nostalgia for the Bush era. They are urging Jeb Bush, the ex-president’s younger brother and the former governor of Florida, to explore a presidential campaign. They are nuts...
Jeb Bush’s Mexican wife, his record of promoting Hispanics and his one-time tally of 61 per cent of the Latino vote have all piqued the interest of Republican strategists. But he cannot replicate these numbers nationally. An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in March found 48 per cent of voters would “definitely not vote for him” under any circumstances. There is no reason to believe they are playing coy. Mr Bush would need to get 96 per cent of the undecided vote to win...
It is not merely antipathy among Democrats that accounts for Mr Bush’s shaky polling numbers. His party is split, perhaps fatally, between its wealthy donors and its déclassé voters. So big is the role of fundraising in national politics that few politicians spend enough time with non-millionaires to realise how distant from voters they have become.
This is a danger sign for Republicans. The plutocratic wing chose the party's presidential nominee in 2012 and demoralized everybody. In recent weeks, Mr Bush has made contact with Romney donors. He has auditioned at an unseemly Las Vegas dinner hosted by the gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson, who poured $93m into the last election...
Democrats won the last two presidential elections by nominating someone who inspires their party base, and then battling it out for uncommitted voters. The Republican party is following a different strategy. It is courting money men and trusting that the red-hot rank-and-file members will fall into line, having no place else to go. But they will not...
...Mr Bush is being promoted by Republicans whose main interest in the party is that it not nominate someone who will shake up the Obama-era economic settlement. The strategy seems bound to produce an electoral loss. That appears to be of little concern to the people devising it."
The Republicans of today seem to have forgotten one of the most important political analects of their first president, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
The Bush family, Karl Rove, and others like them had better realize that their days of successful velvet gloved demagoguery based on fear mongering their "declasse" voters to act against their own rational self interest are over. The image of Rove's incoherent blathering about Ohio on Fox election night in 2012, clearly delusional, and evoking Hitler in the bunker moving imaginary armies around on the war planning table, sums up the current dilemma of the Republican Party. It may take a catastrophic loss in 2016 led by these people to inject some reality back into that party's viability on the national level.
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