The Republican with seemingly the best chance of sitting in the Oval Office used to occupy a parallel room in the Florida Governor’s Mansion.
Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, honorary UF alumnus and relative to two of the last four presidents of the U.S. is probably running for that office himself.
No one affiliated with Bush has confirmed this yet, of course, but he announced last year in a Facebook post that he is going to “actively explore” a presidential run. In the same post, he said he’d be creating a political action committee. Then he resigned from several of his positions in corporate board rooms in the earliest moments of 2015. A fourth Bush presidential campaign is all but officially underway.
And at the moment, he’s far and away the easiest Republican contender to take seriously. Unlike many other GOP presidential hopefuls, Bush — like Hillary Clinton — has ducked away from attention and embarrassment. That’s more than can be said for the many who spoke at last month’s Freedom Summit. Bush’s strategy is to stay out of the public eye, allowing other aspiring candidates to make fools of themselves 11 months before 2016. It seems to be working; he’s already leading in primary polls. Democrats are painting him as a kind of Romney 2.0, which is really less of an insult than they think it is.
With everything laid out, it looks like Bush is an easy bet for the 2016 Republican nomination, and the presidency itself, if he can manage it. Even so, he’s got clear failings that he’ll have to make up for if he’s to carry a national election.
Bush’s shortcomings became glaringly clear earlier this week when he hired Ethan Czahor. Czahor is a tech entrepreneur with multiple startup experiences, including a brief foray into social media with Hipster.com, which was a short-lived photo sharing site. He was hired as chief technology officer for Bush’s Right To Rise PAC. So far, he’s doing some nifty things, like embedding a goading “Want to work on the greatest political tech stack ever created?” into the HTML of the PAC’s website, encouraging people to send in their resumes.
Clearly, Czahor is a resourceful and creative talent — any campaign would be lucky to have him.
Unfortunately, his Twitter account suggests otherwise. Yesterday, BuzzFeed cataloged tweets that had been deleted from Czahor’s account — in all, 45 tweets were deleted Monday. After reading through a selection of them, we can certainly see why; they’re a collection of nasty, rather immature jokes about women and gay men, groups who historically haven’t had the greatest relationship with the Republican Party. A particularly foul one called female art majors sluts and female science majors “also sluts but uglier.”
Granted, the tweets in question are all pretty old, and a spokeswoman has already declared Bush found them inappropriate and that they were deleted at his request. But still — the wildly sexist nature of Czahor’s tweets says many things about him, and no deletion will stop that from reflecting on Bush.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 2/10/2015 under the headline “Bush can’t escape embarrassment from staff member"]
