Jeb shifts attacks to Rubio

JEB SHIFTS ATTACKS TO RUBIO
Under pressure, Jeb Bush is hitting harder than ever against Sen. Marco Rubio, as Bush’s one time protégé surpasses him in the polls.

On the trail in New Hampshire Wednesday, Bush compared Rubio’s campaign message to that of President Obama and warned of a similar result if Rubio was elected. Pressed on his comments today in an interview with MSNBC, Bush went further.

Bush said Rubio lacked the “leadership skills” and said that Rubio would not be able to “fix things” in Washington.

It comes at a difficult moment for Bush as Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has, ahem, “reset” the 2016 presidential race.

Russia’s offensive in Syria is a threshold moment that history will long record. Rather than just the ongoing efforts to reestablish “Great Russia” through the subduction of weak neighbor states and veiled (if thinly) military maneuvers, this is open aggression in a contested territory in the worst neighborhood in the world.

And Putin’s military began the operations by targeting American-backed forces. When Moscow targets American proxies in a Third World hellhole, you know we’re all the way back to the bad old days.

But as history collides with the venality of the 2016 presidential contests, it means particular problems for certain candidates, Bush among them. While he has recently embraced the idea that he is best situated to lead U.S. foreign affairs because he is “a Bush,” sorting out his brother’s Middle East legacy has proved, so far, intractable.

As Bush comes to closer embrace his brother’s foreign policy, discussing how best to escalate a ground war in the region is a huge problem.

Painting Rubio as unready and unsteady won’t be an easy task for Bush, though. He’s on the record from 2012 explicitly saying Rubio was more experienced than Obama and pushed Rubio as Mitt Romney’s running mate.

But Bush’s shift from trying to engage with frontrunner Donald Trump to fourth-place Rubio is likely necessary given the worries that Bush’s early backers may abandon him for the ascendant Rubio.