At the London Review of Books, Chris Lehmann has written one of his customarily excellent pieces, this time about the elephantine field of GOP hopefuls, all of whom could be described as the embodiment of the Horatio Alger myth, a bunch of ragged Dicks. As bad as any might be nominal frontrunner Jeb Bush, who has thus far shown in public and private life that being the “brighter Bush brother” doesn’t suggest a significant difference in wattage.

Lehmann’s opening:

It is a cliché of American electioneering for candidates to advertise their humble beginnings and unstinting ascent in the face of adversity. Even George W. Bush, with his Andover and Skull-and-Bones East Coast Brahmin pedigree, offered up his own version of the log cabin myth, alluding to his drunken youth and subsequent soul-saving entry into the evangelical fold, and taking self-deprecating potshots at his tricky time as part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. The message was that these episodes were tests of the candidate’s resolve, temporary setbacks in the higher drama of his journey to the Texas governor’s mansion. (It didn’t matter that Bush’s gubernatorial track record was decidedly dismal, since the log cabin myth is about how you attain great office, not what you actually do when you get there.)

But the emerging field of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election is something else altogether. Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way. There is, for starters, George’s younger brother Jeb: not yet a formal candidate, but already on course to raise $1 billion in campaign funds. (He has deliberately delayed his official entry into the field in order to wring every dollar he can from big-money political action committees; once he becomes a runner, the rules forbid him from dealing directly with them.) Jeb has dined out for most of his career on his image as the clever Bush brother, but as his quasi-campaign heated up and the press started to ask questions about actual policies, he immediately undermined this unearned plaudit by saying he would have followed to the letter George’s catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq. After realising that this was a position now seen as insane even by most Republicans, he tried to retreat from it with a series of flailing clarifications.

Jeb Bush’s own track record is terrible.•