They did it to Bill Bolling, now they’re doing it to Jeb Bush

By Lynn R. Mitchell

Jeb Bush. Not conservative enough. Try as I might, it remains impossible to see these two concepts as even remotely related. John Ellis Bush, the second son of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Bush, who during his first run for Florida governor in 1994 cheerfully called himself a head-banging conservative, a hang-’em-by-the-neck conservative … who during his second run for Florida governor in 1998 had to craft for himself a more compassionate persona so as not to scare off independent voters … that Jeb Bush has come to be viewed with suspicion by the uber-conservative, Tea Party wing of his Republican Party?

They did it to former Virginia Republican Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling who was considered by some to be too conservative when he ran for lieutenant governor in 2005 only to turn around a few years later and be labeled not conservative enough by the newly-arrived “uber-conservative, Tea Party wing” of the Republican Party, as Politico calls it. Reinventing, that is (see Reinventing Jeb Bush: How America misremembers the family’s true conservative).