Skip to footer

Lindsey Graham endorses Jeb Bush. Does that matter?

Mr. Bush’s campaign is in dire straits and Senator Graham’s support is unlikely to change that. But there are tactical reasons why it makes sense.

|
Nati Harnik/AP/File
Former presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R) of South Carolina, endorsed Jeb Bush Friday for the Republican nomination.

Lindsey Graham is endorsing Jeb Bush. The former presidential hopeful and South Carolina senator, who won plaudits for his candor and humor on the
trail but few voters, announced the move Friday in Charleston with Bush at his side.

“Jeb Bush is ready on day one to be a commander-in-chief ... He will put the country ahead of his party,” said Senator Graham at the announcement.

OK. Is this “attaboy” going to matter?

Probably not, in the sense that Mr. Bush’s campaign is in dire straits and Graham’s support is unlikely to change that. Add Graham’s former supporters to those of Bush and you’re still in single digits, at least in national polls.

But there are some tactical reasons why the move makes sense. Graham is a reasonably popular South Carolina senator, and South Carolina comes up third in the primary season, right after Iowa and New Hampshire. At 8.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics rolling average of Palmetto State surveys, Bush is running a bit stronger there than he is in the US as a whole. An endorsement from the hawkish Graham could help Bush in a state with a large military presence.

If Bush could move up a few points, he has a chance of finishing third in South Carolina, behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, according to the way the numbers now stand. That might give him a reason to continue trudging onward in hopes of emerging as the final anti-Trump or anti-Cruz candidate, backed by the Republican establishment.

The larger context of Graham’s endorsement is that it is of a piece with his insistence that Trump and the other outsider candidates represent an existential threat to the Republican Party. When he was still in the race, he talked passionately about this belief.

In endorsing Bush, the most establishmentarian of all the GOP hopefuls, Graham will once again indicate that he’s mad as heck, and he’s not going to take it anymore. In that sense, the endorsement is a primal scream of the Republican elite.

“I believe Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party,” said Graham last December in front of a meeting of Jewish Republican donors. Endorsing Bush now, against all odds, with Trump and Cruz ascendant, is a way for Graham to continue to shake his fist at the stars.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Lindsey Graham endorses Jeb Bush. Does that matter?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2016/0115/Lindsey-Graham-endorses-Jeb-Bush.-Does-that-matter
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe