The One Issue that Will Complicate Jeb Bushs Campaign
TIME Politics 2016 Election Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush speaks in Hollywood, Fla. on Jan. 29, 2014. Wilfredo LeeAP
Jeb Bush loves Common Core. The Republican base hates it.
Bushs announcement this morning that he plans to explore the possibility of running for President of the United States means that the Republican Party is going to have to sort out where it stands on this tinderbox of an issue.
Common Core is a set of academic standards put together by a bipartisan group of governors and promoted by the Obama administration. While both Republicans and Democrats first embraced the standards back in 2010 and 2011, they have fallen out of favor in the last few years. Grassroots conservatives and Republican office-holders now regularly condemn it as federal overreach and parents have protested changes in how subjects like math are taught under states new Common Core-aligned curricula.
Common Core now represents a kind of shorthand among Republicans: if youre a real conservative, youre against it; if youre a faker, youre for it. As a result, Republican governors in Oklahoma, Indiana, South Carolina and Missouri have scrambled to get on the right side of that divide, angrily decrying Common Core as shameless government overreach or even smearing it as Obama-core.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who is often listed among the potential Republican presidential hopefuls, used to support Common Core, but now is so publicly against it that he has launched lawsuits against his own state and the U.S. Department of Education, claiming that the standards are a violation of state rights.
While most of that is shameless political theater, it still leaves Jeb Bush in a tricky position: in order to win the Republican nomination, hes going to have to win over the Republican conservative base, which hates Common Core with the fire of a thousand suns. The easiest way to do that would be to disown Common Core. But thats not likely to be in the cards.
For the past two years, Bush has been one of the loudest proponents of Common Core, among both Republicans and Democrats, boldly refusing to walk back his supporteven when members of the Florida Tea Party called for his head, and even when the issue threatened to derail Republican Rick Scotts tight race during this years midterms.
In late November, Bush told a crowd at a national education summit hosted by his group, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, that while he found the debate about Common Core troubling, he support was unwavering. He seemed to suggest that conservatives had been tricked into thinking that the Common Core was a federal program. Education should be a national priority, not turned into a federal program, he told the crowd, before urging them to keep fighting for reform and for Common Core.
This leaves Bushand the Republican Party, toowith two basic choices. Bush can continue to embrace Common Core, but work with the Republican Party to rebrand it as an essentially Republican, states rights issue. Or he can walk back his support for the standards, which would be seen by many moderate Republicans, as well as his supporters in the education reform community, as a shameless cop-out.
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The One Issue that Will Complicate Jeb Bushs Campaign