Jeb Bush in Buzzfeed.com

On Education: Common Core is the right thing to do for our country

Jeb is one of the nation's leading champions of Common Core standards, a move toward nationalizing America's patchwork education; his foundation recently launched an ad campaign promoting them. The move is driven by a broad consensus of labor and business groups, as well as philanthropists like Bill Gates, but it has proven intensely unpopular with a Republican base generally suspicious of federal control and specifically focused on local autonomy in education.

"I guess I've been out of office for a while," Bush told Fox News this week. "So the idea that something I support that people are opposed to, it means that I have to stop supporting it if there's not any reason based on fact to do that? I just--maybe it's stubbornness, but I just don't seem compelled to run for cover when I think this is the right thing to do for our country."

Source: Ben Smith on BuzzFeed.com, "Terrible Candidate" Apr 7, 2014

On Immigration: Immigrants are committed to family, even if illegally here

On immigration, there's an elite consensus behind "comprehensive immigration reform" that would provide legal status and a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. Bush is a particularly impassioned spokesman for this consensus: "Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans, over the last 20 years," Jeb said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in June 2013. "Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity."

This Sunday, he went further in describing the motives of some undocumented immigrants in deeply positive terms: "Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony," Jeb said. "It's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family."

The problem: The only people absent from this consensus are the leaders of his own party. House Republicans have for a decade bottled up "amnesty."

Source: Ben Smith on BuzzFeed.com, "Terrible Candidate" Apr 7, 2014

On Principles & Values: GOP isn't about orthodoxy & disallowing disagreement

I asked Jeb there about the Republican Party. "Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad--they would have a hard time if you define the Republican Party--and I don't--as having an orthodoxy that doesn't allow for disagreement, doesn't allow for finding some common ground," Bush said, adding that he views the hyper-partisan moment as "temporary."

"Back to my dad's time and Ronald Reagan's time--they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support," he said. Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did."

In the 12 years(!) since he last ran for office, Bush missed the rise of the tea party, and the ascendancy of a new generation of politicians--Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, among them. Those men occasionally, carefully, respectfully break with the movement. Scorning today's Republican Party is, by contrast, the core of Jeb's political identity.

Source: Ben Smith on BuzzFeed.com, "Terrible Candidate" Apr 7, 2014

The above quotations are from Buzzfeed.com political reporting and commentary. Click here for other excerpts from Buzzfeed.com political reporting and commentary. Click here for other excerpts by Jeb Bush. Click here for a profile of Jeb Bush.
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