Could today's GOP be a lemming parade?

Jeb Bush Questions G.O.P.’s Shift to the Right

By JIM RUTENBERG, NYT

For the better part of three decades, there has been no more prominent family in Republican politics than the Bushes.

But tough talk about the state of the party on Monday by former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — who went so far as to say that Ronald Reagan and his father would have a “hard time” fitting in during this Tea Party era — exhibited a growing distance between the family, which until not very long ago embodied mainstream Republicanism, and the no-compromise conservative activists now driving the party.

Speaking at a breakfast with national reporters held by Bloomberg View in Manhattan, Mr. Bush questioned the party’s approach to immigration, deficit reduction and partisanship, saying that his father, former President George Bush, and Reagan would struggle with “an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.”

Going one better, he praised his father’s 1990 deficit-reduction deal, which drew the lasting ire of his party’s fiscal hawks for its tax increases.

Mr. Bush has always taken a path separate from those of his brother and his father, and friends said his words were those of a man free from the restraints of electoral politics. He said on CBS last week that he had no interest in being vice president to Mitt Romney — whom he has endorsed — and that while he has not ruled out a presidential run in the future, this year was “probably my time.”

(More here.)