Jeb Bush is, for now, operating outside of politics. The former Florida governor and brother of the former president declined to run for a Senate seat in his state, and says he wasn’t tempted to run for president last year.
Bush, whose party has seen better days, gave an interview to Tucker Carlson for Esquire with his thoughts on the GOP’s future.
On intelligence, faux populism and Joe the Plumber:
I think it’s okay to have a deeper understanding of things. I think it’s okay to talk in three-syllable words. The world we’re living in is incredibly complex. And simplifying things to the point where you’re misunderstanding where we are as a nation isn’t going to help people overcome their fears or give them hope that they can achieve great things. I don’t get inspired by shameless populism.
After that, it’s not surprising Bush didn’t list Sarah Palin as a future GOP leader. When asked who is leading the Republicans, he said, “The next generation of leaders are going to be people we probably don’t even know.” But he did name Newt Gingrich, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Rick Baker, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Fla., as possibilities.
He lamented the Republican Party’s loss of the last two national election cycles and urged his fellow conservatives to come up with new ideas and “find creative ways of expressing the principles.”
We haven’t upgraded our message. We haven’t updated it. If you close your eyes and listen to most Republicans, most conservatives, the same speech could have been given in 1990. And you can’t discount that. It’s a pretty important point. If people think our message is outdated, our message is not relevant to the world we live in, and I think a growing number of people may feel that, you lose your relevance.
But he blamed the loss of power not on tired ideas or an overall change in public sentiment, but on the GOP’s “tactics of politics.”
In this interim period, we have to pay for our sins and show some humility.
[The interviewer:] What are those sins?
We didn’t advocate our positions well enough to win.
