http://spectator.org/print/65494Political Hay
The Bushes Try to Make Trump the New McCain
Ex-President who won nasty 2000 South Carolina battle returns to the scene.
By Jeffrey Lord – 2.16.16
Here we go again.
Donald Trump has attacked the Bushes — and with a reflexiveness I’m not even sure his pro-Establishment critics understand — he has been ferociously attacked for doing so.
Over at the New York Post John Podhoretz assails Trump in the South Carolina debate as “out of control,” saying: “So you want to know how Jeb did? His best debate yet.” Podhoretz goes on to say of Trump that if Trump wins South Carolina: “We will know for a certainty that the man Republicans want for their tribune in 2016 is a disgusting jerk…”
Ah, yes. Attacking the conservative base of the GOP is the go-to reflex in Establishment-land. We’re all a bunch of barbarians out here who simply don’t belong in what Ronald Reagan used to disdain as the “fraternal order.” We don’t know our red wines from our whites, and you can’t have primitives who mistake the salad fork for the dinner fork at the GOP table.
Well.
To these Establishmentarians the Trump performance was a call for the smelling salts. Trump attacked the Bushes. O…M…G!!!!
What seems to go right over the heads of these fine folks is that there is more to this than just the battle between Ronald Reagan and the GOP Establishment all over again. To be sure, Trump isn’t Reagan. As noted often enough, no two human souls are alike. But while the animosity on display towards Trump from the Bush camp and the larger GOP Establishment is exactly what was on display as Reagan did battle with both the Bushes and the GOP years ago — there’s more here.
Put aside the Reagan-Bush divide. With President Bush 43 now campaigning in South Carolina for Jeb — and with Jeb Bush haughtily defending John McCain as a “hero” and taking such umbrage at Trump attacks on the Bushes — let’s take a look back at the 2000 GOP primary in South Carolina between George W. Bush and John McCain. — Let’s just see how “the Bushes” and the GOP Establishment work when challenged. Suffice to say the Bush campaign of 2000 and its allies treated John McCain as anything but a hero. And conducted the Bush campaign in a way far distant from the public image Jeb Bush seeks to portray.
Take a look at this 2008 story in Vanity Fair about the George W. Bush-McCain showdown in South Carolina in 2000. The title:
The Trashing of John McCain
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