"Low-energy": Donald Trump's favorite diss on Jeb Bush, explained

Donald Trump thinks Jeb Bush is low-energy.

The Republican presidential candidate called his rival "a very low-energy kind of guy" on September 2, "a low-energy person" on August 28, "very low energy" on August 24, and various other twists on the basic theme.

It's the campaign diss of 2015 — short on explicit content, yet rich with undertones of meaning. And Trump has clearly gotten under Bush's skin, because Jeb has taken the bait and attempted to directly rebut the change. The question of Bush's energy has become a shouting match between a cartoon character turned unexpected poll leader and a stumbling ostensible frontrunner.

What is a low-energy person?

This is not a term that has circulated widely in American political discourse, but we all have a sense of the personality. And Susan Scott, a self-described biblical counselor whose website I encountered researching this article, has a typology based in part on the low-energy/high-energy dichotomy.

Scott explains, "High-energy people are fast talkers, fast thinkers, fast decision-makers, fast movers. These are the folks who don’t sit still for long, are always making new plans and coming up with new ideas." By contrast, those in the low-energy camp are "more deliberate in their planning, slower to make decisions, thoughtful and pensive, more relaxed, less prone to quick flashes of temper."

In Scott's terms, Trump is a coach — a high-energy, task-oriented person who trains apprentices on television and promises to Make America Great Again through his dealmaking prowess. Marco Rubio is more of a cheerleader, while low-energy Bush seems like a classic manager, and the hopelessly boring Scott Walker is a team player.

John Maxwell's book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership asserts that it's important for collaborators to have similar energy levels. "The high-energy person thinks the low-energy one is lazy," he writes, "and the low-energy person thinks the high-energy one is insane." This certainly seems to describe how much of the GOP establishment feels about Trump, if nothing else.

Okay, but what does Trump really mean?

Mind-reading is impossible, especially with a figure as enigmatic as Trump. But most men I've spoken to interpret Trump as alluding to Jeb's virility, or lack thereof. Trump is suggesting that Jeb has "low T" or erectile dysfunction, or at a minimum lacks the outward projections of masculine vigor that society expects from a president.

From JFK to Bill Clinton to even Warren Harding, Americans have been willing to overlook a lot of excessively high-energy behavior from their presidents. Other men have become frontrunners largely due to factors outside their own achievements. Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush was the obvious choice for the GOP nomination in 1988, yet he was dogged by a perception that he was a wimp. Al Gore, similarly situated, struggled to project an "alpha male" persona.

Trump is saying that Jeb is more his father's son than his brother's brother.

Why does this line of attack resonate?

The issue is really less about Jeb Bush than it is about the Republican Party base. Simply put, Jeb became an instant frontrunner in the race even though nobody in the rank and file was especially excited about him. He got there because an incredibly large share of Republican elites worked for either his brother or his father at one time or another. That creates a vast web of donors, bundlers, and operatives who are networked not just with the Bush family but with each other.

The network wants to converge on a single candidate and collaborate on the pursuit of victory. Jeb Bush, as the guy named Bush, is the natural default coordination point.

In the abstract, this is as good a reason as any. But it means there's no mass constituency of people who are genuinely enthusiastic about Bush. Hillary Clinton is not, per se, an exciting public speaker, but there are millions of progressive-minded women who are very excited about the prospect of her taking office. Mitt Romney was a rather gray character, but his candidacy was an enormous cultural breakthrough for America's millions of conservative Mormons.

Jeb is the guy who was governor of Florida before the guy who preceded the current governor of Florida. In other words, regardless of Bush's personal energy level, the Jeb Bush campaign is a low-energy phenomenon.

What's Jeb going to do about it?

According to an excellent report by Jonathan Martin, Bush's current strategy is a mix of missing-the-point counterpunching and denial.

First, the counterpunching:

"I’ll just give you a little taste of the ‘low energy’ candidate’s life this week," said Mr. Bush, referring to the stinging taunt Mr. Trump has repeatedly used to describe him.

Mr. Bush then spent a minute and a half reeling off the cities he had visited since Monday — among them McAllen, Tex.; Salt Lake City; Denver; Pensacola, Fla.; Birmingham, Ala.; Greensboro, N.C. — and noted that, earlier in the week, he had risen at 6 a.m. to go running with former members of the Navy SEALs near the Virginia coast.

Second, the denial:

On Saturday, after remaining with the congregation for a singing of the hymn "Adon Olam," set to the tune of "God Bless America," Mr. Bush walked out of the synagogue toward his waiting S.U.V. He was asked by a reporter if he was frustrated with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bush shot back, "I don’t think I mentioned his name."

But he did not leave it there. After climbing into the passenger seat and closing the door, Mr. Bush lowered the window and, as the vehicle edged out of the parking lot, three more times demanded: "Did I mention his name?"

Lame.

Has Bush always been so low-energy?

The larger irony here is that Bush's low-energy persona is itself a carefully constructed political ploy. Back in his unsuccessful 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Bush called himself a "head-banging" conservative who talked about "blowing up" state agencies and said he wanted to "club this government into submission." He bragged that he would sign many more death warrants as governor, and proposed that the names of juvenile delinquents should be publicized so people would "know who the thugs are in their neighborhoods."

But as Andrew Prokop has written, after losing, Bush refashioned himself as a serious conservative on policy who prefers to talk in reassuring, upbeat phrases.

Bush's problem in this campaign is that it turns out lots of rank-and-file Republicans don't actually share the conservative establishment's policy preferences but do want someone who'll express their sense of outrage at the ways in which they see Barack Obama ruining their country. That's what Trump offers in spades.

Jeb's campaign slogan emphasizes the "right to rise," a clever rhetorical trick that features a Republican talking about the kind of thing — social mobility — that you'd expect to hear a liberal talk about, thus priming the audience to hear the policy substance as moderate. Trump's "Make America Great Again" is considerably less clever: just a blunt appeal to the nostalgia older white voters have for a time before same-sex marriage and black presidents.

Is low-energy leadership really such a bad thing?

Not at all.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the ultimate low-energy politician, and she's managed to deliver a prosperous German economy, shepherd the Greek crisis to a successful conclusion, and turn Germany into Europe's moral leader regarding Syrian refugees.

Closer to home, George H.W. Bush was an unloved president, but an effective one. His earnest budgetary compromises and statesmanlike foreign policy served the country and the world well in an unsettled time. His higher-energy son, by contrast, took office amidst peace and prosperity and presided over two lost wars and the destruction of a major American city.

The problem is that while a high-energy candidate may not be what America — or even the Republican Party — really needs, it's certainly what the conservative faithful want.

The past two decades have seen a paradoxical trend in American politics. People have never been less likely to identify as a member of a political party, but politics is more partisan than ever. Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster have diagnosed the cause as negative partisanship. People like their own party a bit less than they used to, but they dislike the other party much more than they used to.

Jeb's straight-outta-1998 affect is all wrong for this environment. Increasingly, Republicans are Republicans because they hate Democrats, not because they love the GOP. Trump's insults-first approach to politics catches this mood, while Jeb's studiously upbeat tone misses it.