So, is this how the rise of the House of Bush ends: not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the less than immortal words “please clap”? This was the feeble plea to which Jeb Bush was forced to resort in early February when a stump speech proved so insufficiently rousing that the audience’s response to what were supposed to be his ovation-inducing lines was – silence.
Less than three weeks after that humiliation, the former Florida governor and presidential hopeful pulled out of the race. The US$130 million (Dh477m) his campaign spent could not lift his ratings into double digits. With the Republican nomination seemingly beyond his reach, last weekend he bowed to the inevitable.
And so draws to a close an era that began in 1952, when Prescott Bush, Jeb and W’s grandfather, was elected as a US senator for Connecticut, followed by both his son George HW Bush and grandson George W Bush serving as president.
Not all are upset at the derailing of the younger brother’s ambitions. “They wanted what they saw as their due, as the royal family of Republican politics,” wrote Maureen Dowd in The New York Times.
It is equally true that in this campaign the managerial, technocratic Jeb Bush often appeared to be lacking the passion and charisma on offer elsewhere.
There was a reason that Donald Trump’s “low energy” jibe stuck. Other than his famous surname, Mr Bush offered no convincing reason why the Republican establishment should rally around him rather than, say, governor John Kasich of Ohio, as the candidate to defeat the two “wacko birds” (as senator John McCain would put it), senator Ted Cruz and Mr Trump.
But the US, and the world, may come to miss the Bush family now that the curtain is falling on their decades in public office.
For the focus on the dynasty occasioned by Jeb’s campaign has reminded us of the careers of the two presidents; and in contrast to the current Republican leadership, both deserve to have their reputations considerably revised.
Bush the elder, for instance, may have been lampooned at the time as awkward and out of touch. But he seems a sage, a model of moderation and restraint by comparison to the hotheads of today’s GOP. Senator Cruz says he wants to carpet- bomb ISIL into oblivion, adding: “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”
Despite the criminal disaster of the younger president Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he was unafraid to talk of “compassionate conservatism” – as opposed to the harsh self-reliance peddled by nearly all on the right these days.
Moreover, George W was so sensitive to how Muslims were treated in America – “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” he said soon after 9/11. “Islam is peace” – that my former colleague Mehdi Hassan, a US-based presenter for Al Jazeera, admitted recently: “I never thought I’d say it, but now I long for the Republican Party of George W Bush.”
Both of them would now be way too moderate for the Republican nomination. The party that constantly calls on the spirit of Reagan completely ignores how pragmatic and flexible the Gipper was.
And a certain sense of manners and privacy and a reluctance to throw insults that one associates with the Bushes has been replaced by scaremongering, scapegoating and scathing abuse.
Please clap? Yes, maybe we should. For all their failings, the Bushes represented a more inclusive, optimistic and benign Republican Party. Their departure bodes ill for America, and also for a world that would rather tear down walls than build them, and embrace strangers fleeing Syria – rather than comparing them to “rabid dogs”, as one GOP candidate did.
Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia
