Jeb Bush: "End is not near...life is good"
NEW LONDON, New Hampshire -- If Jeb Bush's campaign was punch drunk and reeling on Wednesday night after a dismal debate in Colorado, the candidate himself showed no signs of a morning-after hangover in New Hampshire.
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With his shoulders back and chin up, an Bush took to the campaign trail on Thursday with a new slogan -- "JEB CAN FIX IT" -- and a sense of do-or-die urgency that was unmistakably driven by his grim debate showing the night before.
"Right now Washington is not working," Bush told a crowded parking lot at Geno's Chowder and Sandwich Shop in Portsmouth, attempting to get his campaign back on message. "It is completely dysfunctional. The debate last night was a good example of it. There wasn't any substantive questions, where people talk about the questions around their kitchen table. Very few things that were real. It was all about the horserace, it was all about trying to figure out the 'gotcha' question to make people look bad. I know for a fact that we can solve these problems."
After the Colorado debate, Bush awoke Thursday to an avalanche of national media stories declaring his campaign all-but-finished, stories riddled with blind quotes and gossip from anxious donors apparently ready to flee the Bush camp and sign up with his younger rival Marco Rubio.
But on the ground in New Hampshire, a state his campaign now admits he must win, Bush tried to project an air of normalcy. He tried, however awkwardly, to turn his shortcomings into an asset before pivoting back to his comfort zone -- talking about his record in Florida.
"I wish I could talk as well as some of the people on the stage, the big personalities on the stage," Bush said. "But I'm a doer."
The question swirling around Bush's New Hampshire visit was this: Was this a new dawn, or the beginning of the end?
Despite the bad press and his stagnant single-digit poll numbers, Bush said he is in the race for the duration, saying he has eight more debates and an organization built to withstand bumps in the road.
"End is not near. Memo to file. Life is good," Bush told reporters.
Even though this week marked the darkest moment of his campaign, Thursday was strangely enough one of Bush's better days in the Granite state.
The New Hampshire voters who showed up to see him at a pair of picturesque campaign events seemed willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. It didn't hurt that Bush picked up the endorsement of Former New Hampshire Senator and Governor, Judd Gregg, a longtime Bush family ally.
Bill Burke, a Rubio supporter and former police chief from Portsmouth, came away from Bush's first event impressed.
"He was more direct, more forceful and it's clear where he wants to go and that he can be the president," Burke said. "I wish he had said that last night because it really was very brief. I'm still Rubio for now, but Jeb has certainly gone a long way just in this little meeting right now."
Bush decisively repeated his line of attack against Rubio -- that he has been an absent senator while campaigning for president -- after his 10 minute speech came to an end, defying the pundits who called the strategy a misstep.
"I do think people ought to show up and work, for crying out loud," Bush said to a reporter.
Sipping on some of Geno's famous clam chowder, one voter, Ann Kimball of Stratham, said she agreed.
"I think that is a legitimate question," Kimball said. "If you are elected by people in a state and then you do move on seeking other employment down the road, how do you manage both jobs - of campaigning and still being an active senator?"
Burke -- the Rubio supporter -- disagreed. "I think that was a mistake. I don't know who advised him on that."
Standing by the water's edge in Portsmouth, Bush told reporters that he was committed to working hard in New Hampshire and that putting heavy time into the primary states was his plan all along. He aggressively swatted away the questions about the supposed demise of his campaign.
"It's not on life support," he said. "We have the most money. We have the greatest organization. We're doing fine."
Rival campaigns worked to portray a different storyline on Thursday, boasting privately that they were in the process of peeling key supporters away from Bush. But no defectors surfaced on Thursday in the immediate aftermath of the debate and the onslaught of terrible headlines about his campaign.
Publicly, Bush campaign officials and supporters put on a brave face and defaulted to a familiar message: Bush is not the best big stage performer in the field, but he has the best record of any candidate in the Republican race.
"I don't care that he isn't the best debater," said Austin Barbour, a Bush campaign strategist working to organize southern primary states for the candidate. "Obama was the best debater in 2008 and he's been a lousy president. Record is more important to me, a record of cutting $20 billion in taxes and kicking ass as governor."
Other supporters said it's important to ignore and the hyper-active nature of the news cycle and the noise of the pundit class that spent Wednesday night writing Bush obituaries.
"It's incredibly premature to say Jeb's campaign is in a downward spiral," said Jay Ziedman, a Texas-based Bush fundraiser. "He's got an incredible amount of capital, grassroots support and infrastructure in all four primary states and beyond. To just think that a performance at a debate that wasn't necessarily strong is kind of the end-all-be-all is premature and naive."
Al Cardenas, a Bush backer from Florida, said "the narrative about this debate will be irrelevant" by the next debate in Wisconsin on Nov. 10 "No one has yet proven that strong debate performance translates long-term to top tier status," Cardenas added.
There's a discrepancy between the Bush seen on the debate stage, whose sometime awkward sound bites get replayed endlessly on television and the Bush that voters meet at campaign stops and seem to really like. Over the weekend, Bush received an enthusiastic welcome from an audience of roughly 500 in Charleston, South Carolina. Early into the town hall, a woman in the audience yelled "We love you Jeb!" After giving an energetic performance during the event, a large throng surrounded Bush, wanting to meet the candidate in person.
But on national television, the takeaway from that event was Bush appeared aloof and beaten down because the only sound bite played was "elect Trump!" and "I've got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around being miserable."
Bush-world also pushed a potential comeback narrative, pointing to John McCain's back-from-the-dead win in the 2008 primary, a dramatic turnaround that grew out of McCain's grind-it-out efforts in New Hampshire.
That same state is where Bush is hoping to plant a flag, returning next week for a statewide bus tour. "Jeb Can Fix It" -- a new slogan for a new stage of the campaign -- will be emblazoned across the bus itself. Campaign officials also hinted they would be adding even more New Hampshire time to the candidate's schedule than previously allotted.
His second event Thursday in New London was packed to the brim with over 250 attendees -- larger than most of his previous events in the state.
Calling himself a "disruptor," he told the crowd right off the bat that he hopes to take his "servant's heart" to Washington to fix the dysfunction. He stayed well after the event ended, shaking every hand and posing for selfies -- even signing a Snapchat selfie with a high school student.
Far from the debate stage and the millions of television viewers, Bush appeared willing -- for a day at least -- to do the hard work needed to win here.
As one Bush supporter in New Hampshire said Thursday, "he'll crawl over glass on his belly to get to the finish line."