Jeb Bush is right about 2016

It’s become standard practice for presidential candidates to run away from the governing establishments of their parties. So it was a little odd this week to see the latest could-be candidate with the last name of Bush (you can’t get more establishment than that) sucking up to an audience of business execs and reporters at the Four Seasons in Georgetown (OK, maybe you can). It was like Jeb was readying to run for the presidency of Congressional Country Club instead.

In case you missed it, Bush gave a speech extolling the virtues of pragmatism and practicality, which are more often insults in Republican politics these days, and said that a less extremist candidate has to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general.” His pitch strikes a lot of political analysts as hopeful bordering on naive — the kind of self-congratulatory thing you say just before you become the next Fred Thompson.

To me, it says something different, which is that whether or not he has the skill or the drive to mount a serious challenge, Jeb remains the shrewdest political strategist in the family.

The simplest thing to do as a Republican candidate in 2016, and the thing consultants will push their clients to do in every mindless memo, is to follow the most recently established playbook. Political pros, like generals, are almost always fighting the last war.

And so everyone will point to John McCain and Mitt Romney, the party’s last two nominees, as pretty good examples of how to win. Move right and talk tough on issues like immigration and Common Core. Leave all that moderate baggage at the train station. Make yourself palatable, at least, to conservative activists, and then you’ll have plenty of time to re-establish your sobriety once the primaries are over.

But this is 2016 we’re talking about, not 2008 or 2012, and all campaigns are different. McCain’s competition on the right was Mike Huckabee, whose only real appeal, aside from a mellifluous voice, was the constant presence of Chuck Norris everywhere he went. Four years later, the only thing really standing between Romney and the party’s social conservatives was Rick Santorum’s battered pickup truck, which ran out of gas quickly enough.

Bush, on the other hand, would likely be facing a much more crowded and formidable field of candidates across the party’s narrow ideological spectrum. And what he understands is that running in that kind of primary is a little like trying to check out at the Safeway on Super Bowl Sunday. You pick the lane that seems the most promising, and you stay there.

This time around, after all, Iowa’s most engaged conservatives might be able to pick from Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Mike Pence, and Bobby Jindal — not to mention Santorum and that truck again. In a field like that, if your name is Bush and you once worked for Lehman Brothers and you’ve championed a more compassionate approach to immigrants and a national school curriculum, making yourself merely acceptable to the activist base isn’t going to get you very far. Just because they can get over their lingering mistrust doesn’t mean they’re going to vote for you over so many viable, more steadfast alternatives.

I remember traveling through Iowa with Rudy Giuliani in 2007. Back then, believe it or not, the former New York mayor was leading the Republican field in national polls (which kind of shows you what national polls are worth right up until the moment primary voting begins), and he was on a mission to demystify himself to pork farmers and gun enthusiasts.

Giuliani drew overflow crowds, and he said all the right things about immigration and terrorism and abortion, and he was often masterful in the town hall setting, and voters generally left the room with a newfound appreciation for his conservative conviction. On caucus day, having all but given up on the state, he emerged with 3.5 percent of the vote.

The problem for Giuliani was that no matter how ardently or expertly he allayed the concerns of conservative voters, he wasn’t ever going to be their first choice. They went for Huckabee, who had himself a nice little run for a few weeks. Meanwhile, McCain overtook Giuliani as the electable option in states like New Hampshire and Florida, and America’s mayor found himself quickly marginalized.

I’m no strategist, but it seems to me that the smart play this time, if you’re Bush or Chris Christie or Marco Rubio, is to let the other guys fight it out for Survivalist of the Year and set your sights on the party’s other, broader constituencies: the right-leaning independents and mainline conservatives who fear that a Republican nominee too easily caricatured as extreme will lead the country straight into the embrace of Hillary Clinton. If you can unify that voting bloc, more or less, and end up going one-on-one with a candidate like Paul or Walker on Super Tuesday, then you’ve got a very real path to the nomination.

Skeptics of the “be yourself” theory will hurl the two words that make every unapologetically pragmatic Republican wince: Jon Huntsman! Well, OK. I spent some time with him, too — enough to know that while Huntsman is a remarkably bright and decent guy, he had nowhere near the clarity of thought or the ability to communicate it that a Bush or a Christie does. And Huntsman, who basically landed in New Hampshire after two years in Beijing, had very little by way of a record or a political brand, which is a problem these other guys don’t have.

Sometimes political failure is less about the absence of a constituency than it is about the absence of a candidate who’s compelling and ready.

Bush is probably both of those things. I remain doubtful he’ll run, just because if he were so driven to live in the hurricane of public life for years on end, he probably wouldn’t have been wearing a flowing guayabera the last time I met him in Florida. I don’t know whether he can retrain himself to speak in short, pithy lines that can’t be ripped out of context, or whether voters might be unnerved by his unusually large head.

What I do know is that Jeb Bush isn’t going to be the hard-edged conservative pick for president in 2016, so there’s really no percentage for him in acting like it. And judging from his latest comments, Bush knows it, too.