There was “Jeb!” Now there’s “Jeb?”
Obviously Jeb Bush is positioning himself for 2016. He’ll be speaking at the upcoming CPAC, and he’s on a media-maximizing book tour for Immigration Wars: Forging An American Solution, which he co-wrote with Clint Bolick, the director of the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. Bush’s hope is that he can overcome the devalued Bush surname, the connotations of monarchial entitlement, serious FCAT scrutiny and the recent Republican drift to the ideological fringes.
Immigration Wars, however, may be a miscalculation in a party that arguably needs to tack closer to the center and re-introduce itself to Hispanics if it wants to succeed beyond Tea Partying primary love-ins. Bush, the Spanish-speaking immigration moderate with the Mexican wife, now agrees–in his book–with those who maintain that undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be given a pathway to citizenship.
Even if he tries to nuance this harder line, Bush has put himself to the right of Marco Rubio on immigration. It also inexplicably puts him on the wrong side with most Hispanics. No, the Bush position is not tantamount to a “self deportation” shout-out, but it hardly helps critically important Hispanic outreach. In English or Spanish.