Report: Bush and Clinton seem inevitable, except to voters

As Hillary Clinton engages in her presidential rollout, Part II (Chapter 1 didn’t go so well), and Jeb Bush prepares to launch his campaign for the White House (after dodging federal campaign finance laws for many months), Matt Bai, national political columnist for Yahoo News, points out what the political pundits are missing about these two familiar faces.
The analysts and prognosticators fail to appreciate is that the American voters have decided, on second thought, that they don’t particularly like these two people on a personal level.

Clinton’s approval ratings were sky high last year but now a majority, 52 percent, tell pollsters they don’t consider the former first lady honest or trustworthy.

Bush posted some significant leads in the GOP presidential field a few months back but now a majority of those recently polled, 51 percent, say they have an unfavorable view of the former Florida governor.
Bai writes that the idea that the public is weary of the Bushes and Clintons defies the pattern of the last century of U.S. political history which was dominated by the dynasties of the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Bushes.

Frankly, Bai nicely describes how the return of Clinton and Bush is not unlike a reunion of friends that goes awry:

“If there’s one thing we all love in politics, it’s the idea of the candidate who seems above the litany of daily disappointments in Washington. Presidential narratives are often built around the idea that a candidate has been away somewhere (other than prison, say) and is just now coming back because he can’t stand what a mess all these lesser politicians have made of things.

“… Clinton and Bush embody that idea … After four years as secretary of state, followed by a few years of relative seclusion, Clinton was enjoying the highest approval ratings of her political life; to most Americans who weren’t hardened anti-Clinton conspiracists, she seemed to have entered the realm of statesmanship.
“Bush spent most of the last decade talking reasonably about education reform and the environment, to the point where a lot of voters had almost forgotten about his partisan role in the recount debacle of 2000.

“The problem is that once you return to the arena, once you start giving speeches that sound more or less like everybody else’s, then you’re no longer departed, and we can’t quite remember why it was you seemed so alluring in the first place. Suddenly you’re a politician again.”