The Problem With JEB! Bush’s Brain

Don't Blame Me This Time!

You knew it had to happen soon: Someone at Politico (or actually two someones, Anna Palmer and Eli Stokols) would get on the horn with some of the donors who poured more than $100 million into the Jeb Bush super-pac Right to [Rule] and would reliably hear and report some high-end bitching. And the object of this unhappiness was equally predictable: Right to [Rule] chieftain and longtime Republican campaign consultant Mike Murphy, who has burned through about half of the vast RTR war chest even as his candidate went from being the unquestioned front-runner to this feckless and much-ridiculed guy battling Chris Christie for fourth place in Iowa and running38 points behind a reality-TV star in the state he governed for eight years.

So "burned" is exactly how some of these contributors feel. And thus, they're not remembering Mike Murphy the alleged strategic genius, but instead Mike Murphy the man who talked Meg Whitman into spending upward of $150 million of her own money to run a hammerheaded ad campaign in 2010 that drove most California swing voters to start screaming "Enough!" at their TV screens well before Election Day. Suddenly every decision Murphy has made is suspect...
Read more.