Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome makes one blind to the realities of Post-America

Ben Smith at Buzzfeed has had the opportunity to take the measure of Jeb Bush up close and personal:

I’ve actually met him only once, in a gorgeous breakfast room atop Manhattan’s Bloomberg Tower, in front of a sweeping view of the East River. The breakfast was part of a series with a distinctly Bloombergian vibe: editors rather than reporters, healthy snacks, elite centrism. I asked Jeb there about the Republican Party, whose mantle he’s now apparently considering seeking. He didn’t need much prodding, either, to go after his fellow Republicans or to blunder into making news.

“Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad — they would have a hard time if you define the Republican Party — and I don’t — as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground,” Bush said, adding that he views the hyper-partisan moment as “temporary.”

“Back to my dad’s time and Ronald Reagan’s time — they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support,” he said. Reagan “would be criticized for doing the things that he did.”

The notion that Jeb Bush is going to be the Republican presidential nominee is a fantasy nourished by the people who used to run the Republican Party. Bush has been out of a game that changed radically during the 12 years(!) since he last ran for office. He missed the transformation of his brother from Republican savior to squish; the rise of the tea party; the molding of his peer Mitt Romney into a movement conservative; and the ascendancy of a new generation of politicians — Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, among them — who have been fully shaped by and trained in that new dynamic. Those men occasionally, carefully, respectfully break with the movement. Scorning today’s Republican Party is, by contrast, the core of Jeb’s political identity.

In that, Jeb is like ex-Republican Mike Bloomberg and like the failed GOP apostate Jon Huntsman: He’s deeply committed to centrist causes — federalized education, legal status for undocumented immigrants — that alienate key Republican groups; and he’s vaguely willing to go along with vestigial conservative issues that Republicans don’t care as much about, like standing up for Wall Street . . . 

Yep, Jeb is way past his sell-by date.  Any of the viable candidates for 2016 would mop the floor with him.  One point on which I differ with Smith:  I missed "the molding of Mitt Romney into a movement conservative."  That one completely flew under my radar.