
Speaking to Michigan’s party faithful at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference over the weekend, Jeb Bush made his critics’ case for them.
Riffing on his foreign policy credentials, and arguing that the next president will need to foster international peace, he said:
I know how to do this because, yes, I am a Bush.
Jeb has spent a lot of time arguing that despite the family name he’s his own man. Which I guess is plausible if you ignore the family’s big donors and all those holdovers from his brother’s and father’s administrations in top policy positions in his campaign. (For example, 19 of 21 of Jeb’s foreign policy advisers worked for one George or the other or both, including Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, chief architects of W’s war in Iraq.)
Having declared in last week’s debate that his brother “kept us safe” while 9/11 happened on his watch, Jeb has apparently decided to embrace rather than run from his family’s legacy, especially on foreign policy, Iraq War I, Iraq War II, 9/11, Afghanistan, and all. This could finally signal that the candidate has figured out how to respond to questions about the family business he’s hoping to inherit.
As campaign communications go, his Mackinac declaration has the virtue of being short, succinct, to-the-point, even kind of high-energy. “Yes, I am a Bush,” will sound great in a campaign ad.
A Hillary Clinton ad.