A must read for the NJGOP

The story is titled, "Inside Jeb Bush's $150 Million Failure".

The story appeared in Politico, as the once invincible Bush candidacy went up in smoke.

Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment’s last, best hope, began his 2016 campaign rationally enough, with a painstakingly collated operational blueprint his team called, with NFL swagger, “The Playbook.”

On page after page kept safe in a binder, the playbook laid out a strategy for a race his advisers were certain would be played on Bush’s terms — an updated, if familiar version of previous Bush family campaigns where cash, organization and a Republican electorate ultimately committed to an electable center-right candidate would prevail.

The playbook, hatched by Sally Bradshaw, Mike Murphy and a handful of other Bush confidants in dozens of meetings during the first half of 2015 and described to POLITICO by some of Bush’s closest and most influential supporters, appealed to the Bush family penchant for shock-and-awe strategy. The campaign would commence with six months of fundraising for the Right to Rise super PAC and enough muscle to push aside Mitt Romney. There would be a massive, broad-based organizational effort to plant roots in March states at a time when other campaigns were mired in Iowa and New Hampshire. The plan outlined Bush’s positive, future-focused message with an emphasis on his decade-old record of accomplishment as Florida governor.

Interviews with more than two dozen Bush insiders, donors and staff members illuminate the plight of an earnest and smart candidate who was tragicomically mismatched to the electorate of his own party...

The entire premise of Bush’s candidacy, these insiders tell POLITICO, was an epic misread of a GOP base...

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/jeb-bush-dropping-out-set-up-to-fail-213662#ixzz40yDgcwdu

Remember these phrases, because they not only apply to the Bush candidacy in 2016 -- but also to the NJGOP's tragic loss of four incumbent legislators last year.  This is who you are too:

Earnest and smart candidates who are mismatched to the electorate of their own party.

An epic misread of the GOP base.

The Republican electorate has watched their economic security and cultural values destroyed while they have been lied to and pissed on by the leaders of their own party.  You can spend all you want on masterful media but people know in their guts that their party has screwed them.

The anger is live.  The indictment of the party and its leadership are their statements, their votes, their sources of funding -- which stand in black and white just waiting to have light cast upon them. 

Wake up.  Open your eyes.  Pay attention.  It is not too late but it will be soon.