Is former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) running for vice president? The answer is now, and always has been, “yes.” This explains the curious hostility of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina after Wednesday night’s Republican debate. Walker is, or was, the last best (or worst) hope for the old-line GOP and on Wednesday night, he saw it all slip away from him. And so it did for Bush and the old-line GOP as well.
{mosads}Who’s afraid of Carly Fiorina? The East Coast-based Republican Party, come to be called in our time the “Eastern Establishment.” Although the creative and mysterious TV show from the 1990s, “The X-Files,” had a better name for the quiet and anonymous well-dressed aged men who ran the world from secret oak-panelled rooms in New York City: The Elders.
With Walker, they could still see a future, but just barely as in twilight. Not long ago, they were sure they could see the future with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
It goes back further. They began to feel tremors when the very popular Texas Gov. Rick Perry ran for reelection in 2010. And that would well bring the end of life as they knew it: The end of New York money, dominance and influence in America.
Visualize this: A world that did not awaken to the millennia rising from New York City and Wall Street. Visualize a world instead that awakened at the Alamo. Visualize Austin, Texas as the center of the world, East, West, South and the Great White North. Forget Washington, Jefferson and Madison. Visualize Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and Sam Houston as the Founding Fathers.
For that was what was at stake here, and nothing less.
In his book, Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry proposed a virtual dismembering of Washington, leaving behind only the powers prescribed in the the Constitution. Radical! He liked to quote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous observation that a “state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
But was that not why we sacked Atlanta and what we burned a path to the sea to prevent: states’ rights? And were not the Texans, and Perry in particular, talking about it again, this time citing the great Brandeis?
If Perry was reelected governor in Texas in 2010, he would next be running for president (which he was, and did).
The solution was clear: Jeb Bush would save them. But how to get from there to here? The answer in Texas was Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. They would run her in the gubernatorial primary against Perry. It had all the appearances to The Elders of a stroke of genius, and Vice President Cheney, President George H.W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker and even baseball legend Nolan Ryan came to bat against Perry. Imagine Hutchinson as Texas governor and there you have it: the GOP’s answer to Hillary Clinton’s run in 2016. And with Bush as VP, they could take it: Hutchinson/Bush 2016.
Hutchinson, to no one’s surprise, fell flat, and Perry won the primary in a landslide. Then the burly governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, suddenly appeared, yelling at irritants, waving his arms at press; kind of a street version of Sylvester Stallone, had the Italian Stallion remained behind in the old neighborhood. The old GOP was instantly fascinated. And the money quickly went to him.
In the fever, one of the GOP worthies blurted out on TV, “Christie for president. Jeb Bush for vice president.” (In 2011, it was still too close to the “bad brother,” President George W. Bush.) That would be the path. They had former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger calling up Christie assuring him that they (The Elders) were behind him. They had Barbara Bush, former first lady, calling Christie’s wife, telling her how much she would love the second floor of the White House, where the family lives. And Jeb, the introvert, would probably like being vice president. Maybe after eight years, he would get used to it. It would give them a full run of 16 years; eight for Christie and eight for Jeb if America remained asleep at the wheel.
Today, this week, it all ended. Bush will not be president. He will not be vice president to Walker, Christie, Ben Carson, Hutchison or any of the shorter candidates on the stage with him this Wednesday night.
The old GOP, the Republican Eastern Establishment — The Elders — is dead. The options today are Donald Trump or the formidable Texan, Austin-born Carly Fiorina.
Just when they had finally gotten rid of Rick Perry.
The penultimate sentence’s reference to Fiorina as a Texan has been revised.
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.