- Reaction score
- 3
- Points
- 430
cupper said:I see this ending in one of two ways:
1) Mitt quietly fades back into the smokey back rooms after a long discussion with GOP politicheskoe byuro about why he won't win a general election this time around
2) Mitt goes into the GOP clown show and runs maybe a moderately distant second to a "Fresh" "New" nominee.
Seems that Mitt took the first option, and perhaps may have been the best for both him and the party.
Not necessarily the best outcome for Jeb Bush however, as he will now be fully in the crosshairs of the far right, rather than having Romney drawing away some of the fire.
And it's somewhat telling how bad the split in the GOP is, when a hard conservative like Bush is being criticized by the right as being too soft because of his stance on immigration and Common Core.
But if he does make it through the clown show, he will have a big issue to address in the general election.
Jeb ‘Put Me Through Hell’
Michael Schiavo knows as well as anyone what Jeb Bush can do with executive power. He thinks you ought to know too.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/jeb-bush-terri-schiavo-114730.html#.VM7yC0uRtM8
—Sitting recently on his brick back patio here, Michael Schiavo called Jeb Bush a vindictive, untrustworthy coward.
For years, the self-described “average Joe” felt harassed, targeted and tormented by the most important person in the state.
“It was a living hell,” he said, “and I blame him.”
Michael Schiavo was the husband of Terri Schiavo, the brain-dead woman from the Tampa Bay area who ended up at the center of one of the most contentious, drawn-out conflicts in the history of America’s culture wars. The fight over her death lasted almost a decade. It started as a private legal back-and-forth between her husband and her parents. Before it ended, it moved from circuit courts to district courts to state courts to federal courts, to the U.S. Supreme Court, from the state legislature in Tallahassee to Congress in Washington. The president got involved. So did the pope.
But it never would have become what it became if not for the dogged intervention of the governor of Florida at the time, the second son of the 41st president, the younger brother of the 43rd, the man who sits near the top of the extended early list of likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates. On sustained, concentrated display, seen in thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of emails he sent, was Jeb the converted Catholic, Jeb the pro-life conservative, Jeb the hands-on workaholic, Jeb the all-hours emailer—confident, competitive, powerful, obstinate Jeb. Longtime watchers of John Ellis Bush say what he did throughout the Terri Schiavo case demonstrates how he would operate in the Oval Office. They say it’s the Jebbest thing Jeb’s ever done.
The case showed he “will pursue whatever he thinks is right, virtually forever,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. “It’s a theme of Jeb’s governorship: He really pushed executive power to the limits.”
“If you want to understand Jeb Bush, he’s guided by principle over convenience,” said Dennis Baxley, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives during Bush’s governorship and still. “He may be wrong about something, but he knows what he believes.”
And what he believed in this case, and what he did, said Miami's Dan Gelber, a Democratic member of the state House during Bush’s governorship, “probably was more defining than I suspect Jeb would like.”
For Michael Schiavo, though, the importance of the episode—Bush’s involvement from 2003 to 2005, and what it might mean now for his almost certain candidacy—is even more viscerally obvious.
Jeb Bush speaks to reporters during a news conference about Terri Schiavo on March 18, 2005. | AP Photo
“He should be ashamed,” he said. “And I think people really need to know what type of person he is. To bring as much pain as he did, to me and my family, that should be an issue.”
More at link.
Essentially Bush overstepped his authority under Florida's Constitution, and attempted to overrule court decisions at all levels which allowed the removal of Terry Schiavo's feeding tubes.
Would Bush do something similar as president? It's possible, but Gubernatorial prerogatives are different from those of President, and it would be difficult for him to ignore advice from his staff and councils. Especially when it could effect chances of reelection.