Daniel J. McGraw is a political writer living in Lakewood, Ohio.

To hear Jeb Bush tell it, he’s right where he wants to be, the “joyful tortoise” in the race who doesn’t want to say “outrageous things that turns people off to the conservative message.” At the Koch Brothers’ GOP donor convocation in Dana Point, Calif., over the weekend, Bush waxed confident about the campaign strategy he’s following, including the $120 million war chest he’s spent six months amassing. “I mean, this is a long haul,” Bush said.

But many GOP voters don’t seem to care about the long haul. And they’re certainly not looking for a joyful tortoise. They want a fire-breathing dragon. They want, above all, passion. They want it now. And they’re not finding it in Jeb Bush.


Enter Donald Trump. Strategists in the Bush camp seem unconcerned about the vituperative magnate’s sudden rise in the polls, with one of them telling The New York Times that in the end the Trump surge will only create “panic” in the GOP and drive voters to Bush.

That seems wishful thinking at best. The ease with which Trump has stepped into the passion vacuum in the Republican race points up a bigger problem for Jeb: The only excitement generated by his Bush candidacy so far seems manufactured, much like the exclamation point at the end of his Jeb! logo. Given what a commanding lead he has built in money and organization, it’s striking how Bush’s poll numbers have been flat or declining. In New Hampshire, where Bush’s pragmatic and moderate conservatism was supposed to play well, he had 21 percent support in early June, but only 12 percent in a poll taken July 28. In Iowa, he is closer to the middle of the 17-candidate field than the top.

At an event for Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst last month, Cathy Grawe, who has been active in the Iowa GOP for more than 20 years, says she talked to more than 100 potential voters and that “not one mentioned Jeb Bush. Not good or bad. Not that I’m thinking of voting for him. Nothing. Zero.”

Social media mentions, the new currency of national name recognition, provide another striking measure. According to the New York University Media and Political Participation Lab, between June 17 and July 29, Trump averaged about 250,000 Twitter mentions per day, while Jeb Bush averaged about 25,000.

“We are still in the infancy of interpreting social media data,” says Joshua A. Tucker, an NYU political science professor and co-director of the lab. “But this thing we can say for sure. About ten times as many people that use Twitter are mentioning Donald Trump than Jeb Bush, and they are doing that of their own accord.”

“They might be mocking Trump or praising him, but you can see by these numbers that there is at least strong opinions of Trump,” Tucker says. “There doesn’t seem to be as much strong opinion either way on Bush.”

And that’s why the debate on Thursday in Cleveland might be key for Jeb Bush. Usually it’s wise a frontrunner in a debate to stay above the fray and let the lower-tier candidates fight it out. But Jeb Bush is not a frontrunner right now, so he has to walk a fine line between playing attack dog against Trump, who arguably is, and protecting himself from the many other attack dogs on that stage eager to chew on his leg.

Ironically the best strategy for Bush may be to go way back to his last failed political campaign, in 1994, a time when he himself was the passionate firebrand conservative.

***

One thing Bush should be concerned about, if he’s not already, is whether he’s responding to the Trump phenomenon—and specifically to Trump’s attacks—with enough vigor and passion. What he should be asking himself is: Am I in danger of becoming Michael Dukakis? Already?

Recall the infamous moment when Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic nominee, was asked by CNN’s Bernard Shaw at a debate whether he would support the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered. Dukakis’ passionless reply—“No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life”—solidified his reputation as an out-of-touch wonk.

Bush may be in the process of generating a similar image on the campaign trail. After Trump called Mexican undocumented immigrants rapists, and Bush mildly criticized him by saying “his views are way out of the mainstream,” Trump doubled down by taking on Bush’s wife of 41 years, Columba, who was born in Mexico. Trump retweeted (though it was later deleted) a remark about Bush’s wife: “#JebBush has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife.” Bush didn’t even bother to answer the insult himself and instead had an aide respond to the tweet, saying meekly that Trump was “wholly inappropriate and not reflective of the Republican party’s views.”

Bush also failed to deliver a direct response to Hillary Clinton’s mockery of his “right to rise” Super PAC and campaign theme in recent days, again leaving it to a campaign aide to respond.

In contrast to Bush (and Dukakis), recall how Bill Clinton handled a similar episode during the Democratic primary season in 1992. At an Illinois debate, California Governor Jerry Brown accused Clinton of funneling Arkansas state business contracts to Hillary Clinton’s law firm. Bill Clinton glared at Brown and then pointed his finger a few feet from Brown’s face.

“I don’t care what you say about me,” the future president growled, “but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife.”

Trump has mounted other attacks that Jeb Bush has failed to answer. He called Bush “pathetic” for supporting Common Core and lambasted his “weak stance on immigration.” And he has said that George W. Bush “didn’t have the IQ” to be president.

That is not to say that Jeb Bush should hurl insults like Trump. But if a candidate doesn’t get publicly angry when a challenger makes ugly comments about his wife, it is hard to see what he will rile him up—or how he will rile up his party.

“Ultimately, [Bush] has to come out of the debate as a senior statesman and respected politician,” says Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA political science professor. “But he can't be a shrinking violet.”

***

Jeb once did know how to be passionate, how to throw red meat to the crowds of Republicans hungry for it. In 1994, during his first governor’s race in Florida, Jeb Bush lost to Democrat Lawton Chiles by running too far to the right. “He called himself a head-banging conservative and trotted out the litany of Heritage Foundation social conservative and economic issue, but he lost,” says Robert Crew, a professor of political science at Florida State University and author of Jeb Bush: Aggressive Conservatism in Florida.

During that campaign, Bush said that women on welfare “should be able to get their life together and find a husband.” In an editorial in the Miami Herald, Bush wrote of gay rights: “Should sodomy be elevated to the same constitutional status as race and religion. My answer is No. We have enough special categories, enough victims, without creating even more.”

He lambasted Chiles for being soft on crime and ran a television ad featuring the mother of a murder victim saying Chiles had not worked hard enough to have the man responsible executed even though Chiles had nothing to do with that part of the legal process. The attack echoed George W.H. Bush’s use of criminal scare tactics during his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. “Your father had the record (for negative campaigning) with that Willie Horton ad, but you’ve outdone that now,” Chiles said to Bush during a televised debate.

“[Jeb Bush] had a meanness to him in that campaign, blasting Chiles for not being conservative enough and it didn’t sit well with voters,” Crew says. “So he went into the middle more and started cultivating this message that he was the smartest guy in the room, the policy wonk. He didn’t have a passionate following, but he was smart enough to see the state changing from Yellow Dog Democrat to a new southern Republican state. And he won because he positioned himself as a pragmatist and didn’t stray too far from those Yellow Dog Democrats who were shifting parties.”

But that history of pragmatism is what Crew and others see as the big problem right now for Bush. He is playing the game as it was in Florida in 1998, and not how the Republican Party will be in 2016. Dartmouth College political science professor Brendan Nyhan says Bush, “has been almost neglectful of the conservative base to the point that his standing with conservative is very weak right now.”

“The Tea Party has created a non-evangelical counterweight to the establishment that Bush represents,” Nyhan continues. “The GOP landscape has changed and he hasn’t adjusted very well. Bush is struggling to articulate a rationale for his candidacy that excites voters in the party. And part of that problem was that he was last in office a long time ago.”

***

Journalists often overstate the importance of passionate supporters. Those who quietly write checks can be very passionate about their candidate without the media knowing. And those who vote for a candidate because they feel strongly about their views count just as much as those who are holding their nose while pulling the lever for a candidate. But in a Republican primary with 17 candidates, passion must count for something.

“It’s been my experience that the time when people get passionate about a campaign is when they feel like they have taken ownership of it, and that usually comes later after all the stuff at the start has been sorted out, “ says Casey Phillips, co-founder and creative director of RedPrint Strategy, a Republican media and campaign consulting firm.

Support for Bush at this point in time is, to use the old cliché, a mile wide but an inch deep. Getting the depth down to a foot or more “has been a problem that every politician has encountered forever,” Phillips says, “and the problem in the primary season is that everyone is an inch deep. As people fall out, your support gets deeper, and the passion evolves into something you can use. Door-to-door, volunteers, talking to neighbors, working the phones.”

“In a way, voting for Bush is more of a business decision, not one of passion,” says Drake University political science professor Dennis Goldford. “The ones who support him now are doing so with their heads and not their hearts.”

In Iowa, says Goldford, the candidate who gets the most bump from the caucuses is the one perceived as the anti-frontrunner. In this year’s caucuses, that might be someone who emerges as the anti-Trump. The problem for Jeb Bush is that he might not emerge as the frontrunner, or the anti-frontrunner, just one of the mob in the middle. “That’s not a good place to be,” says Goldford.

“The importance of the passion supporters is still there, and will always be there,” says Nick Gourevitch, executive vice president of Global Strategy Group, a polling firm that works mostly with Democrats. “It’s pretty important in the Republican primaries this year, especially the early ones, because having a small number of enthusiastic supporters can get you through to the next round.”

Which for Jeb Bush makes the campaign strategy very clear right now. He needs to worry less about positioning himself for the general election and more about the next round. He has to do what made him lose in 1994, get a little more mean and nasty with Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and Scott Walker and Rand Paul in the debate this week. That means less of a economic policy wonk discussion, and more of a frontal assault. Starting with Donald Trump.