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cal04

(41,505 posts) Wed Feb 18, 2015, 04:38 PM Feb 2015

Bush again reminds us that he’s not his father or brother. His staffing tells a different story

Last edited Wed Feb 18, 2015, 09:58 PM - Edit history (1)

Jeb Bush, Acknowledging Family Mistakes, Lays Out His Foreign Policy Vision
The all-but-certain 2016er again reminds us that he’s not his father or brother. His staffing tells a different story.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/twenty-sixteen/jeb-bush-acknowledging-family-mistakes-lays-out-his-foreign-policy-vision-20150218

(snip)

"I love my brother, I love my dad, I actually love my mother as well, I hope that's okay. I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make," he said in the address at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "But I am my own man – and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences."

Though Bush emphasized his differences from his family, the staffing inside his budding campaign tells a different story. According to Reuters, his foreign policy team will include veterans of both his father's and brother's administration: James Baker, a top aide and cabinet secretary for George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, and Paul Wolfowitz, who designed George W. Bush's strategy in Iraq. Much of his team, in fact, is culled from his elder brother's roster.

Rather than distinguishing himself from his family, however, he expressed confusion with the focus on his family, telling the crowd "this is a fascinating thing in the political world for some reason." He also laid out his own foreign policy vision—one of "liberty diplomacy"—in contrast to President Obama's "inconsistent and indecisive" foreign policy, which he criticized as having left America "less influential in the world."

In a slip, he said that problem is "best demonstrated by this administration's approach to Iraq." A few seconds later he stopped himself, correcting to Iran and criticizing Obama for being "unequal to the task" of keeping the country from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities.

Jeb Bush is his own man --- except when it comes to his advisers
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeb-bush-is-his-own-man-except-when-it-comes-to-his-advisers/article/2560368