George P. says Jeb’s on track. Yes, really

By World Series time in 1999, George W. Bush was polling at 60 percent in his first race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Today, Jeb Bush is closer to 6.

Since the Rangers, the Houston Astros and the Chicago Cubs are all in the baseball playoffs the same year, we know anything is possible.

But nobody would say Bush is in good shape — except somebody on the same team.

“I think this is the position [where] he’s always wanted to be,” son George P. Bush said last week.

He said it with a straight face.

“He kind of describes himself on the campaign trail as a … tortoise in a race of hares,” the younger Bush, Texas’ state land commissioner, said in an interview to be telecast at 9 a.m. Sunday on WFAA/Channel 8’s Inside Texas Politics (also on wfaa.com or by podcast).

“This is a long marathon,” said Bush, 39, a former Fort Worth resident.

“You’ve got to have a track record. You’ve got to have an organization, and right now we’re still in the silly season.”

No argument there.

Later the same day, according to The Dallas Morning News, Bush told a business crowd that the only presidents with no previous experience in elected office were George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower, and that the current Republican front-runners don’t bring that kind of profile.

(Also Zachary Taylor, William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover, but you get the idea.)

In both appearances, he said his father has an experienced campaign team that can win in November, and money.

But he also has 7 percent in Iowa and hasn’t led since June.

“If he were here, he would say this is the position he wants to be,” George P. Bush repeated in the TV interview.

While front-runner Donald Trump brags about his TV ratings and plays for attention by sending Sen. Marco Rubio a case of “Trump Ice Natural Spring Water,” and challengers go on talk shows to play off the current leadership ruckus in Washington, Jeb Bush seems on some other channel.

“He’s reaching out to voters, building the team and presenting substantive public policy proposals,” George P. Bush said, adding later: “Dad is about as cerebral of a candidate as you’ll find, and what disappoints him about D.C. right now is … rhetoric instead of substance.”

George P. Bush has been criticized for missing about a week’s work campaigning. But Dad will need him to campaign more, particularly in Texas and among veterans.

No leading candidate in either party served in the military.

George P. Bush was deployed six months as a U.S. Navy Reserve officer off Afghanistan.

Bush said veterans need a president who “follows through on the high rate of unemployment, the high rate of suicide … making sure we look out for our battle buddies.”

If world tensions grow, voters might look back to a Bush.

This story was originally published October 10, 2015 at 7:01 PM with the headline "George P. says Jeb’s on track. Yes, really."