Things aren’t looking so hot over at Jeb!, the ambitious startup propping up the most Floridian of all the Bush scions. Their slogan is “Jeb Can Fix It,” and although they haven’t defined what “it” is, they apparently can’t even fix their floundering campaign.
So today the the Jebs are “rebooting,” with a new slogan and a new tour schedule and a new book. Ah yes, a book! That’ll do the trick! Consider democracy “fixed”!
Now we’re being treated to this brave new slogan “Jeb Can Fix It,” which sounds like something you say about your teenage cousin who knows how to reboot the router when the internet goes down.
And that’s not the only problem with it.
Jeb can fix WHAT? Fix your cat? Fix a fight? Fix your credit? So far, all he’s managed to “fix” is his staffers’ salaries, which he recently cut by 40 percent. That certainly sounds like the kind of thing a successful campaign would do.
Meanwhile a top staffer just resigned from the campaign, and lately Jeb’s been filling his offices with former George W. Bush personalities. Ah, what a fun reunion: gathering up all the old cronies from the dark days of George W! A return to happier times. He also just hired the guy who was his dad’s media coach back in the ’80s. In other words, Jeb Can Fix It by hiring the guys who fixed things for his brother and dad.
I can just imagine Jeb right now, looking around anxiously at the team he’s assembled, then glancing at a portrait of the Bush family hanging on the wall in which his brother has managed to get a baby carrot stuck in his nose. “Wait,” Jeb will think, his horror mounting as he stares at his vastly more successful sibling, “am I the stupid one?”
The new slogan is also, unfortunately, as Gawker points out, a near-copy of the slogan employed by British TV personality/child molester Jimmy Saville. Saville had a TV show called “Jim’ll Fix it” in which children would write to them with their wishes, and he would show up to grant them. He also sexually abused children throughout his career, according to law enforcement and a documentary made after his death, so these days telling a British person that anyone will “fix it” is like hiring Bill Cosby to be a campaign spokesman.
And what are we to make of this new “book” of his? It’s called Reply All, which is the thing that your coworkers do that you hate because you wind up with an inbox full of garbage. The book reflects back on his time as governor of Florida — a time marked by a dramatic increase in the use of animated GIFs depicting Bugs Bunny sawing the state off of the country.
Most of Reply All rounds up emails from/to constituents — good thinking, Jeb, put out a book that you didn’t even have to write — and is 730 fucking pages long. Sounds like some real fun summer reading. “I hope you enjoy reading about medical liability tort reform, because it was one of my top priorities for 2003,” the book actually says, and that is not a joke.
It is maybe a little bit telling that about half the time, when I describe something the Jeb! campaign has done, I have to clarify whether or not I’m joking.