Jeb Bush on Tuesday brushed off the suggestion, made by former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, that the troubled legacy of his older brother George W. Bush has dragged him down in the 2016 race.
In a phone interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Bush responded to concerns Romney recently told The Washington Post that he’d aired to him during a private January 2015 conversation.
“We talked about the campaign ‘cause he was thinking about running and I went out to see him,” Bush recalled. “I wanted him to know that I was all in and had a plan to win this, and I still do. But my brother—if you did the polling and actually looked at it, he’s probably the most popular president amongst Republicans in this country.”
Romney told the Post that he warned Bush his close family would lead voters to associate him with the tanking economy and drawn-out wars that made headlines when his older brother left office. But the former Florida governor has not shied away from embracing his older brother on the campaign trail, instead celebrating George W. Bush’s “leadership” after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and telling reporters he’s open to having his “very popular” brother campaign on his behalf.
In the “Morning Joe” interview, Jeb Bush expressed confidence that the memory of his brother’s “War on Terror” had “absolutely not” affected his 2016 run.
