Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush says the nation’s problems will never get solved unless there’s a culture change in Washington — and to create that culture, Bush suggests style matters.
“I’ll do it in a way that I guess is like ‘Iowa Nice’. I’ll do it with civility,” Bush says.
Polls show that more than half of likely Iowa Republican Caucus-goers are supporting outsiders like Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, but Bush — who served two terms as Florida’s governor — is banking on a shift among voter attitudes as the February 1st Iowa Caucuses draw near.
“When you get closer and closer to this, it’s going to matter,” Bush said. “That experience matters…Lofty patitudes are not going to be as relevant as direct, sincere plans and the heart to be able to fix things and the leadership skills that are proven.”
Bush spoke this morning at an event hosted by the Greater Des Moines Partnership, a group that represents the chambers of commerce in the Des Moines metro area. Bush called for ending the education “monopoly” and giving parents more choices about where their children go to school. He also called for gradually raising the retirement age for Social Security and “means testing” benefits, so wealthy Americans would not get part or all of the monthly benefits others receive.
A handful of people in the crowd got to ask Bush a question during the event. One man asked Bush whether he supports the effort to “reauthorize” the Voting Rights Act.
“If it’s to reauthorize it to continue to provide regulations on top of states as though we were living in 1960 — ’cause those were basically when many of those rules were put in place — I don’t believe that we should do that,” Bush said. “There’s been dramatic improvement in access to voting, I mean exponentially better improvement and I don’t think there’s a role for the federal government to play in most places, there could be some, but in most places where they did have a constructive role in the ’60s.”
The issue has flared in recent days as Alabama officials closed drivers’ license stations in areas with large black populations. Critics say the move is designed to prevent blacks from getting the photo IDs they must show in order to vote in Alabama. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has issued a statement, calling Alabama’s move a “blast from the Jim Crow past.”