Contrary to what you read, everything politicians say and do don't necessarily always have to be only about 2016. Sometimes, really and truly, presidential calculations are not part of the conversation.
But regarding the coverage of Jeb Bush in the past week, it's hard to think anything else. Bush, of course, is the son and brother of former presidents. He has been urged to run for president since 2008, and the drumbeat for 2016 is getting louder ... especially since he helped it along by saying he is not ruling it out. With a Republican Party still trying to find its way after a second consecutive presidential defeat — and having lost the popular vote five of the last six times — what Bush says matters. Of course, whatever utterances he makes are always described as being part of White House strategic planning. Sometimes such conclusions are silly. This time they may make sense.
The former two-term governor of Florida has not run for office since 2002, and has up to now refused to get caught up in public presidential speculation. Widely acknowledged as a power behind the scenes, he is seen as politically savvy and astute. It's long been thought that had he won his 1994 gubernatorial campaign against Lawton Chiles in Florida, it would have been Jeb — not brother George W. — whom the GOP turned to in 2000. What he says carries great weight, and when he criticized his party last year for its approach to overhauling the nation's immigration laws, people sat up and paid attention. You're not going to win over the hearts of Latino voters, Bush said over and over, by talking about self-deportation and blocking paths to citizenship for those who are here illegally.
But in his new book, Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution (co-authored with Clint Bolick), Bush is no longer focusing on a path to citizenship. Let's talk instead about residency rights. "A grant of citizenship," Bush now says, "is an undeserving reward for conduct we cannot afford to encourage." Pay a fee, he says of those 11 million people here illegally. Pay back taxes. Do community service. Learn English. But the end would be residency, not citizenship. For many, however, the headline was about 2016.
There has been some confusion about what Bush meant and whether he was retreating from his previous statements. But that was drowned out by White House speculation.
Most took the tone of the Washington Post's Peter Wallsten and David Nakamura, who write that the book "puts him more in line with his party's base — the kind of thing a potential presidential contender would be mindful of."
Personally, I think Politico's Alexander Burns has it right when he wrote that this "may have less to do with electoral maneuvering than with Bush's disdain for what he views as the strictures of political debate." But if it began with the theory that Bush was dipping his toe into the 2016 waters, it ended up with a consensus that he stubbed that toe.
Under the header, "Jeb Bush's Poorly Times Flip-Flop," National Journal's Beth Reinhard said Bush is "denting his own reputation as a bold policymaker," all of which "comes down to a colossal political miscalculation":
"Bush's revamped position on citizenship looks like the maneuvering of a potential presidential candidate who wants to outflank [Marco] Rubio and appease the conservative, anti-amnesty contingent that dominates GOP primaries."