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In 2000, George P. Bush – then 24 and about to enter the University of Texas Law School – recorded a Spanish-language commercial for his uncle’s presidential campaign. He seemed prepared to be the next standard-bearer of his legendary family, updated for the 21st century: bilingual, telegenic, the son of a governor and an immigrant from Mexico. The creator of the campaign’s ads, Mark McKinnon, started calling him “47”, in anticipation of “P”, as he is known to friends and family, he will soon join his grandfather (George H. W. Bush, 41) and Uncle George W. Bush, 43) in the American presidential pantheon.
But now that Bush is finishing the run-off for Texas Attorney General, his place in this political dynasty is an obstacle to a party that is now captive to a different well-known family name.
“It’s hard to work in Texas like Bush. I think that’s the end of the line, “said Richard Murray, a professor of politics at the University of Houston. “Bush is a four-letter word right now in Texas’s far-right politics.
The question for Republican primary voters in Texas today is whether the Bush name turns out to be a bigger problem than even the whirlwind of legal problems haunting incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton – a seven-year charge of securities fraud, a separate FBI corruption investigation and a review of the bar for his efforts to cancel the 2020 election. Paxton denied wrongdoing in all of these cases.
Bush’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The result could be closer than expected, according to Dave Carney, a Republican strategist who advised George W. Bush and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Carney noted that almost 23 percent of early voters did not vote in the primary and it is unclear who they would support.
Texas has been the adoptive home of the Bush family since 1948, when George H. W. Bush, a blue-blooded Connecticut son of a senator, fighter pilot and alumni of Yale, moved with his wife and young son to the Midland oil fields. For eight years, when George W. Bush was at the White House, his ranch in Crawford served as a presidential escape. The state is home to two presidential libraries, an international airport, schools, roads and parks, all bearing the same legendary name.
George P. Bush ran with 100% name recognition, but the name was among his biggest weakness, according to political observers in the country. Forty percent of Texas Republicans told primary voters that they would never vote for Bush, with two-thirds saying the reason was his name, according to a March poll by the Texas Foundation for Spanish Politics. (The second biggest complaint was about Bush’s administration of the historic Alamo site as commissioner of land in Texas, although most voters weren’t sure exactly what he did wrong, according to Mark P. Jones, a policy professor at Rice University who conducted the study.)
The result of the Bush family repeated an alarming finding at the beginning of the 2016 presidential campaign of Bush’s father, Jeb. When campaign internal sociologists asked voters what they didn’t like about the candidate, about 40 percent said it was equivalent to the fact that his name was Bush, according to Tim Miller, who worked as a campaign spokesman.
Trump took advantage of the Republican base’s dissatisfaction with the Bush family, blaming George W. Bush for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in a primary debate in 2016.
“The Bush brand is not what Republican voters are looking for right now,” Miller said. “It’s not like that [George P. Bush] he was a third cousin of Bush or the rebel in the family. He was largely the natural successor to Bush’s original brand, and no matter how much he tried to change it, people felt it wasn’t an authentic MAGA, “he said, referring to Trump’s” Make America Great Again “movement.
Bush tried to anticipate his family legacy by repositioning himself as a candidate for the first America. His campaign distributed red beer mugs depicting Trump shaking hands with Bush and saying, “It’s Bush who got it right.” He ran to the right on immigration, moving from supporting state training for undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children to promising to complete the construction of Trump’s border wall. He called for an “invasion” of the border. He appeared on Real America’s Voice, the right-wing video network that is home to former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to support the addition of more prosecutors to prosecute voter fraud.
Bush also shut down the campaign by hitting Paxton harder on his ethical scandals. Paxton’s ads throughout the campaign attacked Bush as a “liberal.”
“Campaigns still matter, we’ll see who runs a better campaign,” Carney said.
Bush’s gestures against Trumpism made some longtime friends of him and his family.
“I was disappointed with him and told him that in his face,” said Jason Villalba, a former state senator who resigned from the Republican Party in 2016 and now heads the Spanish Politics Foundation in Texas. “But I also know politics. He plays a role he has to play to win. I understand. Trumpism is what it means to be a Republican today. ”
But others say Bush does hold views to the right of prominent members of his family. His father, Jeb Bush, as governor of Florida, was considered a more conservative pet than his brother, George W. Bush, as governor of Texas. And the coming of age of George W. Bush coincided with the rise of a Republican base that valued all-out guerrilla warfare. In 2012, the younger Bush shook the organization of the Texas Republican Party by supporting the long-running conservative torch Ted Cruz for the Senate and then called it the future of the party.
“I’m not at all surprised that George P. will be more conservative and receptive to the changes in the Republican Party over the past 15 to 20 years,” said Darren Shaw, who worked on the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. he is now a professor of politics at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is a new generation and he is more sensitive to some of these problems. I think he’s more than Jeb and W. “
However, many observers say Bush has struggled to convince Texas primary voters that his genes are not his destiny. They’ve been disappointed with Bush before, said Luke Macias, a Texas-based Republican consultant and podcast host who works with the PAC, which supports Paxton.
“George W. Bush has spent his entire political career telling conservatives and evangelicals, ‘I’m one of you,’ and then he often ruled in the middle and campaigned on the right,” Macias said. “There’s a little ‘Lie to me once, be ashamed.’ “Lie to me twice, be ashamed of Texas voters who feel like they’ve been fooled by Bush many times,” he added, quoting a saying the former president made famous.
There was no room for a campaign on the right of Paxton, who asked the Supreme Court to annul the 2020 election, speaking at a rally on January 6, 2021, which turned into an attack on the Capitol and attacked health-promoting gender for transgender children. Paxton concluded Trump’s approval, regardless of the details of all the beer cuckoos.
“The idea that shrubs are not conservative enough is very difficult to understand. 1994, when I watch George W. Bush defeat Anne Richards deftly, I can’t believe 2022 to tell me in 1994 that one day in the future this man will be seen as RINO, “said Evan Smith, chief executive. executive director of the Texas Tribune, using a term that stands for “Republican in Name Only.” “Bush’s brand of conservatism is not calculated in the modern world. The world has changed. ”
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