We certainly have a unique presidential election coming up, don’t we. After all, I can see Hillary Clinton saying something similar about her husband.
“I’m not going to go out of my way to say that, you know, my brother did this wrong or my dad did this wrong. It’s just not gonna happen. I have a hard time with that. I love my family a lot.”- Jeb Bush, Press Gaggle, Flagstaff, Arizona 5/14/15.
I think this is an answer that can evoke a degree of empathy and understanding. If you ponder the pendulum swinging the other way, there would be something off-putting about it if Jeb was taking every opportunity to diss the job his brother did in office, or if he was constantly second-guessing his father. People would see Jeb as a disloyal little shit even if they completely agreed with what he was saying. So, likewise, even if people think Jeb is being evasive or don’t like his answer here, there’s a little bit of approval mixed in with that. He’s acting like good brother and a good son.
And there may be times when Hillary resorts to the same gambit to avoid making strong distinctions with the presidency of her spouse. When you’re in a no-win situation, getting a little credit for not being a complete heel is about the best you hope for.
Yet, these kinds of answers are ultimately unsatisfactory. People want to get a good sense of where the candidates stand, and second guessing decisions that prior presidents have made is the primary way we can get some insight into what kind of president we’re thinking about electing. And there are some questions (or, I should say, answers) that are more useful than others.
In general, we should expect candidates to disapprove of unpopular decisions. When they don’t disapprove of them and say that they would have done the same unpopular thing, that’s news. For this reason, any candidate who said that they’d have invaded Iraq or left the banks unregulated or New Orleans’ levees unprotected or hired Alberto Gonzales as their Attorney General or made Dick Cheney their running mate…that candidate is revealing something valuable about themselves. And so we want to know where Jeb stands on these things.
If he won’t tell us because he doesn’t want to beat up on his family, it’s going to badly undermine his ability to establish trust with the electorate.
Hillary has fewer of these problems because Bill was a more popular president who people generally remember fondly. And no one expects Hillary to promise that she won’t fool around with the interns.
Still, there are areas where Hillary will be asked to explain how she feels about decisions that were made during her husband’s presidency. There’s NAFTA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Crime Bill and welfare reform and Wall Street deregulation and military privatization, and Dick Morris. There’s Bill’s handling of al Qaeda and Yugoslavia, there’s the Iraq Liberation Act. And who removed all the ‘W’s from the White House keyboards!!
That we have two major well-funded candidates with this degree of conflict is unprecedented.
And say what you want about Jeb’s position on Iraq, it’s Hillary who voted to authorize that fiasco.
All of this just makes me want to bang my head against a wall.
But at least I don’t have to answer the questions.
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While I have a visceral reaction to the thought of either Hillary or Jeb winning, if I was managing either of their campaigns I would have them parry any such question something like this: “I’m really not interested in refighting old battles. What I am interested in is this country’s future. We have conflict with Iran and the direction that the next leader sets will have repossessions for the next generation. Obamacare is currently the law of the land – the next president will either strengthen it or uproot it, and who America selects as president matters. We have environmental… Read more »
There’s a huge, missing “but” in that first sentence…
Hillary does have more latitude here, frankly, because Bill owes her. She can’t shit on everything he did, but she can admit his mistakes on a few things like the crime bill/welfare reform tandem that funneled kids to prison. On something like DOMA, Bill himself has already distanced himself from that.
And liberals have an advantage over conservatives, in that we are allowed to change our minds.
I won’t support her unless she backtracks on NAFTA and the WTO and disowns TPP.
She can do it gracefully. Something like, “We always said that fixes were needed to protect workers and the environment. Republican Congresses prevented us from doing that. Elect me AND a Democratic majority and we will fix those treaties.” That’s a bare minimum.
As long as Obama is treating TPP as the most important goal of his administration, she can’t oppose it. She can’t afford to be at odds with Obama.
Ten she is a gutless wonder and the last person we want to be President.
DOMA and the 1994 crime bill and there will be other things before this is over. I fully expect the Big Dog to come out in favor of Glass-Steagal and against welfare “reform” and I, for one, am not even going to get mad at him over it, though I may giggle a little.
Didn’t most or all of those things pass with veto proof majorities anyway?
Actually, I’ve noticed that Bill is getting out ahead of this himself and has personally apologized for his own time in office several times now. Which, for a president, is pretty darn unprecedented (can you think of any others in the last 50 years?)
President Obama is essentially re-winning the 2008 primary all over again as the Clintons repudiate their own era of politics and embrace his legacy and coalition in 2016.
See above. I’m not ready to embrace Obama’s legacy of Republican accommodation and hippie bashing, nor Bowles-Simpson that he <still</i> trots out on occasion..
Right, Obama is supposedly ‘so smart’ and then he trots out something like Bowles-Simpson (maybe not more recently anymore) which no one would be able to credibly defend in a debate with knowledgeable, oh however ‘so smart’ experts like Krugman, Warren, et al. It’s not as if Warren is prepared to debate him on his Pacific rim sell out of the nation. If it weren’t for Wikileaks, we’d have no idea what is in the pipeline. Shhhhh!, it’s a secret we’ll let in on four or five years afterwards.
Wasn’t there something somewhere about Jeb being his own man?
Anyway, I find his response kind of immature. He has to recognize that there’s a difference between “my dad” and “my brother” and the 41st and 43rd presidents of the United States. He’s not being asked about their family relations, he’s being asked about their actions in the public sphere. Especially if he’s getting foreign policy advice from George W. Bush, the questions are entirely legitimate.
Mr. Jeb Bush ()NYT’s style) could avoid all these embarrassing familial issues by simply giving up the whole idea of becoming president. I’d recommend the same to Mrs. Rodham Clinton too. I can hardly believe she wasn’t her husband’s confidant during his and her stint in the WH, that she didn’t have a say in the destruction of Yugoslavia, for instance. After all, she and Chelsea were nearly mowed down by gunfire at the Bosnia airport. That’s how deeply involved she was…psychologically, when dream becomes reality.
“…or made Dick Cheney their running mate…”
Not to nitpick but,,,alright I am nitpicking.
Wasn’t it Dick Cheney made Dick Cheney their running mate? This is one of the decisions Dubya made that came to define his presidency even BEFORE he was president: allowing the man he tasked with selecting a running mate to toss the short list (which did not include the name Dick Cheney) and appoint himself as running mate.
doesn’t that let the President off the hook though for that decision? at the end of the day it was his decision, if he was feeling bullied into picking him all he had to do was leak it and it would be a story for a day or two but Cheney wouldn’t be VP
This is the fundamental issue with dynasties. Either of the inherited kind or the mentor-protege kind. Stepping out of the shadow of your dynastic predecessor is difficult because of the baggage of your predecessor. George W. Bush’s entire presidency was fundamentally an argument with the way his dad (and Jeb’s) conducted policy 1989-1993. And W was determined to be the conservative that Poppy never could be (in W’s and the hard right conservatives’ view). JEB has to take a more virulent right wing and tack it back closer to his Dad’s positions. At the moment, even with all that potential… Read more »
RFK was quite loyal to his brother’s memory, and imo there was much to be loyal about. On CR, he probably noted the major proposals and actions came about only when the timing was right, despite, on the major CR bill, there being considerable disagreement in his admin about going forward in June 63 (e.g, his vice president, LBJ, once he could be found and could be persuaded to give an opinion, argued for delay). On the military, JFK had learned post BoP either to seriously discount or ignore their advice, and repeatedly rejected their formal requests for the US… Read more »
Such a positive record that the JFK administration is the nostalgic standard of US power and respect that even Republicans would like to restore (if only on their conservative terms–a major contradiction).
There’s NAFTA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Crime Bill and welfare reform and Wall Street deregulation and military privatization, and Dick Morris. She and Bill have already backed down on NAFTA and deregulation (saying they had big mistakes/went too far) and repudiated DADT, DOMA, and the Crime Bill. So she’s not having any trouble saying Bill’s policies were mistakes and calling for backtracks and reversals. Twenty years, a disastrous war, and a depression change minds. Everybody knows that. PS At the time I actually supported DOMA, because I thought otherwise we were… Read more »
I don’t see why this is hard. Say, “They did the best they could with the situation as they saw it. But times have changed and we know better now.” Hillary is doing this. Bill is doing this. Jeb was finally forced to say something of the sort, but you can tell he doesn’t actually believe it. One side learned from the past and is continuing to evolve. The other isn’t.
That would require JEB to forgo the plan of attacking Iran or any other countries on the old PNAC list. Old dreams die hard.