Likely GOP Presidential Candidate Jeb Bush Names His Most Influential Policy Advisor

Instead of “Jeb Bush 2016,” perhaps his campaign tagline should be, “If you liked your old president you can keep your old president.”

 

Jeb Bush is raising a lot of cash in New York City today, but the likely Republican presidential candidate also is raising a lot of eyebrows.

The former Florida governor who seems content being among the last of the 2016 candidates to actually formally announce they are running told a small group of supporters Tuesday that his top policy advisor is his brother, former President George W. Bush.

The elder Bush left office with a horrific approval rating, wars across the Middle East, an economy worse than any point in American history, sans the Great Depression, and a legacy that includes many calling him a war criminal.

Jeb Bush, when he began publicly acknowledging he was thinking of running for his brother’s former job, tried to assure supporters he is his own man, despite collecting a group of advisors, almost all of whom had worked in his brother’s administration, or his father’s, President George H.W. Bush.

“If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him,” Bush said, the Washington Post today reports. The Post writes Bush was “speaking to a crowd of high-powered financiers at the Metropolitan Club,” and his “remark came as part of an answer to a question about Bush’s political advisers and their policy views.”

The Post adds that Jeb Bush also sees brother George as a top foreign policy advisor, especially on Israel, and notes that “one attendee said he was ‘stunned’ to hear Jeb Bush specifically mention George W. Bush as his go-to adviser.”

“I started looking around and wondering if people were recording it. It was jarring,” the unnamed attendee said. “If video of it got out, it’d be devastating.”

 

Image by Lynn Freeny/US Dept. of Energy, via Flickr
Hat tip: Taegan Goddard/Political Wire