Jeb Bush follows Hillary Clinton in bid to answer voters’ doubts

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/14/jeb-bush-hillary-clinton-voters-doubts

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The presidential prospects of America’s dynastic political torchbearers, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, will be clearer this week after the dust has settled on setpiece events designed to liberate them from their past, harness the present and lay out compelling visions for the future.

For Bush, once considered the Republican party’s favourite for 2016, that means adding his name to more than a dozen existing candidates at a rally in Miami on Monday; for Clinton, it was a meeting in New York designed to impress uplifting idealism to counter impressions of transparent self-interest around issues of power, charity and personal gain.

At root, each has the same task at hand – to refresh familiar images that are both a privilege and a burden.

For Bush, the past month has been rocky. He has struggled to extricate himself from the record of his brother, George W, on Iraq; he’s been accused of skirting campaign finance laws by delaying his announcement; and he’s been knocked by staff defections and a failure to pull ahead in Republican polling. Campaign staff have sought to make a virtue of his tortoise-like pace: Bush would prefer to be known for deliberation and patience. “It doesn’t happen in a day,” said senior adviser Al Cardenas.

For Clinton, there is a different emphasis. The location of her first big campaign rally – Roosevelt Island, midstream in New York’s East River – was designed to evoke the New Deal and her personal hero of women’s and civil rights, Eleanor Roosevelt.

With Clinton’s candidacy showing marked weakness – 57% of Americans think she is not honest and trustworthy, according to a CNN poll – the event was designed to answer the question that lingers over her candidacy: why she is running again after her decisive loss to Barack Obama.

Competition for the Democratic nomination from former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders may not unduly threaten Clinton yet, but their progressive stances have highlighted how her policies echo her husband’s era and how both are representatives of the 1%.

Sanders, in clear digs at 2016’s two dynastic candidates, speaks of taking on the “billionaire class dominating our economics and our politics”.

While neither Bush nor Clinton is yet prepared to get into policy proposals, preferring to deliver gauzy promises of prosperity and good feelings, they may find that they have more in common than they expected – their mothers.

Last week the Bush family released a photograph of the clan at their summer residence in Kennebunkport, Maine, surrounding the respected matriarch, Barbara, on her 90th birthday.

Earlier in the campaign she suggested her son should not run because the American people might be a little tired of the Bush family. She has now thrown her support behind her son, but vowed to give no interviews, send no tweets and post no instagrams. “I’m not gonna be musing about someone who does something stupid in the campaign,” she said.

With months of non-candidacy candidacy at an end, Bush was in Europe last week, meeting foreign leaders during what a German official called “a broad tour d’horizon” designed to reassure potential counterparts that his knowledge and interest in international affairs is very different from the affable vacuousness his brother displayed.

Clinton is deploying her mother in a different fashion. In 2008 campaign polls found that the story of Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011, resonated well with voters. She was eight when her parents, unable to take care of her, sent her away to grandparents in California. At 14, she was fending for herself. A lifelong rock for Hillary, she inspired her to be an advocate for children and families and to seek her own political career.

Aides hope the sympathetic tale could enhance her personal narrative and soften her image among middle-class voters. A CNN poll released on 2 June showed that only 47% of voters thought that Clinton “cares about people like you”.

Whether either attempt to reset perceptions is successful, both events signal the start of efforts to escape the centrifugal force of their family brands and create their own, independent political characters.

With a Republican field that includes Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker and a host of vanity candidates, Bush may have the harder task in distinguishing himself. But Clinton still has to prove this is not her last campaign, says one Democratic adviser. “She can’t rest on being a Clinton and they know that. She’s going to take a big swing at this.”