I don’t think Jeb Bush surprised anyone with that speech announcing his presidential candidacy. America should know by now what Jeb Bush represents.
It’s not just that his father and brother occupied the White House. You might think Jeb is his own man and would pursue less disastrous policies than they did. But we in Florida know better. Jeb was our governor, you know. And we witnessed firsthand the consequences of putting a Bush scion in power.
As Debbie Wasserman Schultz points out in her Huffington Post blog:
Jeb Bush supports a return to the same, failed trickle-down economic policies that leave so many Americans behind. As Governor of Florida, Bush’s tax policies favored the rich and wealthy corporations at the expense of the middle class. He stood by his brother’s proposal to privatize Social Security and endorsed the Ryan budget that would end Medicare as we know it, policies that would shred the social safety net on which so many Florida seniors rely.
Like so many born to wealth and privilege, Jeb obviously believes in the role of an elite class, the manifest destiny of those who were born to lead.
He is a rich, white man who married the daughter of a Mexican migrant worker. I’m sure his family thought he married “beneath” him. That’s how his kind of people think.
There’s a story that George H. W. Bush called Jeb’s children “the little brown ones,” and I am inclined to believe it.
These “upper crust” Americans feel entitled to wealth and power. They feel they earn it by accepting responsibility for the “lower classes.”
And they are shocked when we in the “lower classes” grumble. After all, don’t we know we’re getting more than we deserve? Don’t we know we’re lucky to have born leaders like Jeb running things? Think of the mess we would make if we were allowed to take charge.
Clearly Jeb sees it as his duty to step in and straighten his country out. It’s not a pleasant task, you know. He will be sacrificing a lot.
He would personally be much better off running his myriad business interests and enjoying his vast wealth and powerful family connections. But duty calls.
If this were some other country, some Third World country, Jeb would fit right in. Those societies are founded on the acceptance of an elite class. But this is America. And the essence of America is its populism. We the People are the rulers here.
That’s what makes America “exceptional.”
So thank you, Master Jeb for your kind offer, but I think we in the “lower classes” would rather make our own decisions and run our own lives. I’m sure we couldn’t make a worse mess of things than your brother did.
