A year ago, Jeb famously said he didn’t need or want conservatives to win.
He thought he had the nomination all wrapped up.
A year later, he finds out he overestimated the extent to which he could win the GOP nomination without the support of the conservative base.
People remember how much he didn’t want to even court them and they’ve repaid his contempt for them in kind.
For Jeb’s current travails, he has no one to blame for his plight but himself. It was entirely self-inflicted.
I think Jeb looked around the country club, the board rooms where he was a director, the Chamber of Commerce fellow honorees and thought, “this is the Republican Party”, we can ignore the religious folks, the libertarians, the military vets, the cultural conservatives, the rural population, the small business men and women, the middle class. Not only ignore them but publicly disdain them which his father often did, except at election time in 1988; when he tried to recover with the base in 1992 after ignoring us for four years, it was too late and many of us went with Perot. What Jeb now finds he can’t ignore is that we are about 85 percent of the Party. Not one person I know who is a Republican views Jeb Bush favorably. But then again, I am not a pal of Thomas Donohue and the Chamber types.