Bill Minutaglio is author of First Son: George W. Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty and professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

It was late October, and notices were flying that Jeb Bush’s lean, handsome son would be at The Prospector’s Grill & Saloon in College Station, Texas, to do some last-minute campaigning for his first political run. The social-media alerts had also been blasting the news that the Mike Ryan band was going to be playing, probably ready to uncork one of its signature songs: “Wasting No More Whiskey .” For now, sitting on his campaign tour bus, George P. Bush stared at ABC’s Jonathan Karl and listened to how the conversation was swinging pretty far away from what George P. planned to do in case he won the election for Texas land commissioner.

He had to know it was going to happen this way. He had to realize that national audiences really didn’t care a whit about the office he was running for in the Lone Star State. No one outside Texas has the slightest idea what the land commissioner does—and probably not even most Texans could really explain the role. What the national media really wanted to know was what the hell his father was going to do:


Karl: So is your dad going to run for president?

Bush: I think he's still assessing it.

Karl: Do you think it's more than 50 percent, less than 50 percent?

Bush: I think it's—it's more than likely that he's giving this a serious thought and moving—and moving forward ...

Karl: More than likely that he'll run?

Bush: That he'll run. If you had asked me a few years back, I—I would have said it was less likely ...

From his bus, George P. could see the small town that is home to Texas A&M University. And if his bus followed the winding George Bush Drive and Barbara Bush Drive, it would take him to the apartment Jeb’s parents, George P.’s grandparents, keep for the times they are visiting their presidential library. Some visitors joke that you can rap a stick on the ceiling as you are queuing up to buy “George Bush socks” at the gift shop and that maybe Barbara Bush herself will knock back from above. Texas A&M, of course, isn’t to be confused with the presidential library and foundation George P.’s uncle, George W., has erected 180 miles to the north in the heart of Dallas.

George P. Bush at a commemoration ceremony at the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, on Sept. 2, 2014. | Getty Images

It’s right here, in the heavily Christian heart of the state, where three generations of Bushes tried to convince voters that they’re really connected to the heartland. That the Bush family DNA is defined by ordinary American values—and not the blue-blood lineage that traces to Yale, the private schools in the Northeast and straight to Wall Street.

It’s been part of every Bush campaign dating back to the early 1960s, and the strategy often seemed to reach its apotheosis in College Station, a place so comfortable to the Bushes that some dubbed it “Kennebunkport South.” Years later, it was a pretty easy decision to steer the first Bush presidential library to the city. The Bush clan liked coming here. So did their friends. Chuck Norris and Garth Brooks (and Brit Hume) were known to come pay homage.

Today, though, it is also the perfect place to map out the attack plan to derail Jeb Bush and any presidential aspirations he harbors. Here, where the Bush shadows linger, Jeb Bush will be forced to confront the conflicted legacies of both his father and brother—and even that of his first child from his marriage to his Mexican-born wife, Columba.

Prop up the pale specter of Bush Fatigue like a nagging ghost that will never go away.”

But here, deep in Texas, he will also be forced to face the muscled-up presence of what Ted Cruz and his Tea Partiers represent to the nation—and even what the recently emboldened wings of the GOP are feeling in the wake of midterm elections. For sure, the edgier wings of the Republican Party are out here in force on the streets of College Station and other places like it across the nation—and it is almost as if the conciliators, the centrist Republicans who might still rally about Jeb’s father, are being forced out to pasture.

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Back on the bus, Karl had one more question for George P. Bush about his father’s dreams of the presidency:

Karl: So the family will be behind him 100 percent?

Bush: The family will be behind him 100 percent if he decides to do it.

And there it was: an easy answer with very complex outcomes—and one that hinted at the low-hanging-fruit blueprint for the dirt doctors who would want to bury Jeb Bush.

Don’t just attack Jeb Bush, his politics as governor, even his family’s brushes with the law.

Relentlessly attack the Bush Dynasty—and prop up the pale specter of Bush Fatigue like a nagging ghost that will never go away.

***

When his son won his bid for Texas land commissioner, Jeb dutifully sent out the requisite statement: “I could not be prouder of George. He ran a great campaign, built his own first-rate team, united a broad and winning coalition and presented a clear vision for the future of Texas.” It had the ring of the same dutiful statements he had to send out when his brother first became governor, and then when his brother became president.

Family insiders told me, years ago, that Jeb Bush was supposed to be the first son to run for president. He was supposed to be president before George W. And he was supposed to be president long before his son ran for a state office that many say is simply a pit stop on the way to bigger political prizes. The family friends said that Jeb was always viewed as smarter and less combustible than George W. And he really was seen as being more like his father in terms of political style—someone who might pick up a few Democratic supporters. But, of course, he lost his first bid for the governor’s office in Florida, and then his almost-unlikely brother lapped him on the way to the Oval Office.

Today, he knows that whatever his grandfather, father, brother and son have done in politics will haunt him—and that the opposition researchers will work overtime at as much guilt-by-association as they can devise. He won’t just be running against Chris Christie, or maybe Hillary Clinton. He’ll be forced by the opposition generals to run against his last name—to run against the collected ephemera, grievances and controversies of his family’s five decades in public life, against the accumulated late-night jokes, the one-liners and the shorthand arranged against him: the “Read my lips,” the hanging chads, the WMDs and the Katrinas.

Of course, they’ll also go to Tallahassee and muck around the stables, looking at his track record on immigration—and suggest he is soft on the issue, even unsubtly invoking his fluency in Spanish and his ethnically diverse family. They’ll look at capital punishment and say he was once hard, but then grew unsteady. On a personal level, they’ll nose around the Lotus Land of Austin, where Jeb attended the University of Texas when some still called the city “the People’s Republic of Austin.” They’ll come sniffing for any whiffs of bad behavior from his early 1970s days in college (he was a Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in under three years), when he arrived in town at about the same time as Willie Nelson. And though it might not reach the Dan Rather-level of pursuit into George W.’s tenure in the Texas Air National Guard, there will also be digging into why Jeb never served in the military.

Too, it’s a given that the attack plan against Jeb will include uncomfortable reminders of his wife once buying $19,000 in clothing and jewelry on a shopping spree in Paris—and then declaring only $500 to federal customs agents. And if push comes to shove, the dirt doctors might resurrect his daughter, Noelle’s, criminal encounters with prescription pills and crack cocaine.

But all of that’s the easy stuff, the one-day stories that elites will sniff at but that probably will never gain any real traction with an electorate primarily concerned about its own family budgets and its own daily struggles. One political researcher in Texas, someone intimately familiar with the Bush family strategies over the years, says that Jeb Bush can brush all of that off—he did in the past, and he can do it again. He won’t find it as easy when it comes to facing attack ads showing his brother’s last approval ratings from his time in the White House, or even his father’s attempts to deal with a dimming economy—not to mention any missteps his son might be accused of while in office in Texas. The anti-Jeb Bush strategy is almost too easy: Make him dance on the edge of a knife by forcing him either to embrace his family’s baggage or to distance himself from it.

From left to right: Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, Jenna Bush Hager, her husband, Henry Hager, Barbara Bush, John Ellis Bush, Jr. and Jeb Bush sing the national anthem during the George W. Bush Presidential Center dedication ceremony in Dallas, Texas, in April 2013. | Getty Images

The Bush family has dealt with the ambivalence before. In 2000, there was a clear sense that the George W. Bush presidential campaign rushed to put some distance from itself and the welling image of a bruising political dynasty. After George W. Bush was demolished in the New Hampshire primary by John McCain, there were meetings to talk about whether the elder George Bush was too visible alongside his son. Whether voters really were growing wary of Bush family members out on the campaign trail for one of their own—and whether there was an inherent danger voters would believe there was a carefully orchestrated, hierarchical bid for power by the family.

Now, the political calculus has Jeb Bush squaring off against a legacy dating back more than a half-century to his grandfather Prescott, the senator from Connecticut. The history apparently didn’t hurt Jeb’s son in Texas—but George P. is young and half-Mexican in a state filled with rapidly shifting demographics. (And if George P. runs for national office, the opposition generals will dust off the same battle plans: Attack his accumulated political lineage and hope it sinks him in the deep end of the drowning pool.)

Three years ago, Jeb Bush began part of his “coming out party”—his early attempts to position himself as a possible contender—by writing an opinion article for the Wall Street Journal. He was trying to take down President Barack Obama as an enemy of free enterprise. It was classic anti-Big Government ideology, and he was suggesting he was clearly shoulder-to-shoulder with the new wave of social conservatives and fiscal hawks: “We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete,” he wrote. “We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.”

If he tries to rise and the spin doctors take aim at him, he’ll have to have more than good luck—he’ll have to survive an all-out assault that revolves around using his own family against him.