The campaign’s fixation on the Florida senator was evidenced by several slides, including one noting the allies of both Rubio and Bush who have sided with Bush’s campaign.
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The Houston event was George W. Bush’s first public campaign appearance for his brother, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the November 2016 presidential election.
Bush has also recruited members of his famous family – namely former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush – to meet with him and his donors at the Houston retreat on Monday. “I happen to believe eventually the American people will say, ‘Who has the experience necessary to be president? Who’s run a state for example?” “We addressed all the key opponents, including Marco, and will contrast Jeb’s leadership skills with theirs”, Jack Oliver, Bush’s campaign finance co-chairman, told The Associated Press.
A hard-hitting strategy presentation at the meeting focused intensely on Rubio and illustrated how Bush and his team plan to show differences between the two Floridians.
Of course, according to an analysis from the political opinion research, Latino Decisions, under the best case scenario for a GOP presidential nomineee – with black voters supporting the Democrat at pre-Obama levels and 60 percent of white voters backing the GOP nominee (a first since 1988) – the Republican presidential nominee would still need at least 42 percent of the Latino vote to win the White House in 2016.
In the presentation, they included a breakdown of the number of staffers and offices the campaign has in each early state: South Carolina: seven paid staffers and three offices; Nevada: eight paid staffers and two offices; New Hampshire: 12 paid staffers and one office; Iowa: 10 paid staffers and two offices. The cuts were calculated based on his and Rubio’s available cash, so as to ensure Bush would have enough to make it to the start of voting in February, campaign aides said.
When asked if his campaign is “falling apart”, Bush simply responded by saying, “blah blah blah blah blah”.
Since announcing his candidacy in June, the younger Bush has struggled to strike the right balance between distancing himself from his family – “I am my own man” was an early refrain – and leveraging the powerful family connections and donor network that provided Bush with more than $100 million in his super-PAC by midyear, dwarfing his competition. The same data also suggest to them that Rubio is Bush’s closest competitor.
Those sentiments were echoed Monday by the former president who said his brother is focused on running a positive campaign focused on the issues.
George W. Bush’s popularity has risen in recent times, especially among Republicans, whereas Jeb is polling well below front-runners Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and seems stuck in the single digits in national surveys.
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When the two were describing their memories of their mother’s cooking, or lack thereof, George W. Bush joked, “If you call pouring a little Hormel out of the box into a boiling pot of water cooking, then she did cook”. “It’s important that you project calm, as Jeb did when those devastating storms hit”.
