Jeb Bush launched his "
I'm my own man" campaign this week but voters just aren't feeling it. In a
Quinnipiac poll of the swing states Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia, 35-39 percent of respondents in each state said they were "less likely" to vote for Bush because of his family ties, while only 8-9 percent in each state were "more likely."
It could be that the sheer baggage of the Bush name is just too much, but Jeb isn't helping matters with the rollout of his campaign. He has now given two high-profile speeches in which he's professed his "love" for his brother and his father—apparently an attempt to let voters know that he isn’t going to spend time apologizing for the sins of their administrations.
But what we didn't know until this week is just how far Jeb would go in embracing his brother's mistakes, especially when it comes to Iraq. The delivery of Bush’s first foreign policy speech this week to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has already been roundly criticized. He was hurried and awkward and managed to conflate Iraq and Iran (oops!). Then he referred to ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as "the guy that's the supreme leader or whatever his new title is—head of the caliphate."
None of that will inspire confidence from voters, 57 percent of whom suddenly favor sending group troops to fight ISIS and 65 percent of whom see ISIS as a "major threat." But even worse, following the speech during the question and answer session—which has consistently been Jeb's best format—he marveled at the "courage" of his brother George W. for implementing the Iraq troop surge of 2007.
"My brother's administration through the surge was one of the most heroic acts of courage politically that any president has done," Jeb Bush said. "It was hugely successful and it created a stability that when [President Obama] came in, he could have built on it."
Sorry, Jeb—calling anything associated with the Iraq War a "success" might play well with the fam at Christmas but it’s a sure loser with voters.
For more connections between Jeb and W.'s advisers, head below the fold.
If there were differences to be drawn between him and his brother, Jeb Bush left all of them to the imagination. His aides simultaneously handed out a list of Jeb's foreign policy advisers that illustrated just how closely tied he really is to W. and all those acts of political courage. Seventeen of Jeb's 21 foreign policy advisers—or 81 percent—worked in his brother's administration.
Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, has the dual distinction of being right at the heart of Jeb's foreign policy heavyweights and leading the charge that helped open up a Pandora's box of sectarian warfare. Wolfowitz and Jeb go way back to the '90s when they joined with 23 other signatories to form a new foreign policy think tank called Project for the New American Century.
Other notable members of the group—which aimed to promote democracy through a more muscular foreign policy—included Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Bill Kristol. Jeb apparently thought better of asking his bother's erstwhile vice president and now archrival to join his roster of policy advisers. Libby, Cheney's former aide, is a convicted felon but probably available these days. And Kristol, a conservative journalist, needs to keep his "objectivity" so he can cheerlead for future wars from the sidelines.
In any case, one of the Project for the New American Century's initiatives included sending a letter to President Bill Clinton that called on him to remove Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, from power. Jeb's name was absent from that letter, but the group's members eventually got the war they were spoiling for—from Clinton’s successor, George W.
It's the war that destabilized Iraq and eventually spawned the scourge we now know as ISIS. It may not be the century most Americans were hoping for but it's the one we got courtesy of the Project for the New American Century.
This week, Jeb Bush demonstrated a stunning lack of fluency and sophistication on foreign policy. But even scarier—whatever he lacks in knowledge will be filled in by the very same bench of advisers who led the nation into the worst foreign policy mistake of our nation's history.