Waiting for JEB! to jump

I"ll "jump" when I'm good and ready. My nomination is already bought and paid for.

(Politico) - By the end of last week, almost everyone had jumped into the pool. Almost everyone except John Ellis Bush, who still sits at the water’s edge of the 2016 presidential campaign, suit dry except for the stray splash thrown his way by his jostling Republican rivals Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

It wasn’t clear at the time, but is increasingly so now, that Jeb Bush’s decision last December to signal, but not formally announce, his candidacy was a short-term logistical masterstroke befitting his family’s reputation for mastering the mechanics of elections. His undeclared status has freed him to raise what aides are saying will be as much as $100 million from rich patrons and outside groups (the second he files presidential paperwork, he’s prevented from requesting big super PAC checks), and it has temporarily shielded him from being the target of shots many of his would-be opponents are leveling at Hillary Clinton. (Aside, that is, from lots of hand-wringing about the increasingly hereditary nature of American politics, and mockery of his insistence that he’ll be his “own man” on foreign policy.)

This inversion — building a campaign on the back of a super PAC instead of vice versa — is novel and could be a model for the future, but it also puts a lot of pressure on an opaque candidate who publicly has done little more than a set of sporadic, low-octane speeches with few specifics to offer. Given his fundraising focus, he’s already dogged by the notion, eagerly pushed by his enemies among the party’s tea party hard-liners, that he’s a bankroll in search of a soul.

Which is why we’ll see the media coverage of the Republican presidential race coalesce, and soon, around a single question: Is Bush actually the front-runner, or just a guy with a lot of money trying to buy the nomination? Read more.