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Washington. -With his campaign logo ready, Jeb Bush yesterday made his big announcement, adding his name to the crowded Republican field for the 2016 US presidential election.
Bush (62) has run a de facto race for six months, raising money and increasing his international profile, including a trip this week to Europe.
Following his speech in Miami, he will set about proving that although he comes from the Bush political dynasty, he is his own man with his own accomplishments to point to and ideas to offer.
On Sunday, his campaign released his logo: “Jeb!” in big red letters on a white background, with 2016 in smaller blue lettering underneath the name.
The family name is carefully avoided.
“I think the transition to a candidacy will allow me to be more direct about my advocacy of the leadership skills necessary for the next president to fix a few things,” Bush told CNN in an interview aired on Sunday.
“And as a candidate,” he added, “I’ll be more specific on policy.”
A Bush campaign video lists reforms he made while governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007.
“The barriers right now on people rising up is the great challenge of our time,” Bush says in the video.
Bush aims to break from the pack of potentially 15 or more Republican hopefuls by portraying himself as an experienced executive leader not tainted by Washington politics and the dysfunction that many Americans associate with politics as usual.
“I can make decisions. I’ve made tough decisions. I have a life experience that’s full,” Bush told CNN.
“Full of warts and full of successes. It’s something that I think has been lacking in the presidency, is to have someone who has been tempered by life.”
Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner on the Democratic side, with no current close competition.
But evidence of Bush’s struggle is apparent in Iowa. It is the state that votes first in the primaries and caucuses that determine the party nominees, with him coming in seventh among declared or potential candidates in a poll last month.
“People make up their mind in the last weeks of these primaries. So my expectation is that we’ll have slow, steady progress,” Bush told CNN.
Nationally, Bush is bunched at the top of most polls, but he is not the dominant figure in the race that many had expected.
In a RealClearPolitics poll average, he leads with 11,3 percent. But six other Republicans are within just four percentage points, including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who topped the Iowa poll.
Fellow Floridian and US Senator Marco Rubio (44) who has shot from the back of the pack to the front, has cast himself as one in a new generation of politicians.
For Bush, his political pedigree as son and brother of two former presidents could end up as either a blessing or a curse.
His last name guarantees him the highest visibility of any Republican candidate. But while US media and polls anointed him his party’s early frontrunner for 2016, he has not lived up to the hype.
Back in December, when he announced he was exploring a presidential bid, there were signs Bush would handily dominate the Republican competition.
There was talk, fuelled by aides speaking privately to reporters and fundraisers, that the main pro-Bush outside spending group was on track to raise a historic $100m by the end of June.
But a recent widely circulated Washington Post story citing two individuals close to his campaign said the Right to Rise super PAC, or political action committee, could fall well short of the nine-digit threshold.
Bush waded into a quagmire last month when he repeatedly waffled over whether he would have authorised an invasion of Iraq.
The series of bungled on-air responses, while potentially damaging for Bush in their own right, highlighted what will likely be one of the candidate’s distracting challenges: overcoming the legacy of his brother George W Bush and his unpopular Iraq policy.
Amplifying the pre-campaign turbulence, Bush announced last week he was shuffling his campaign team.
“There are some real problems for Jeb,” conservative columnist Erick Erickson wrote in TownHall.com.
Jeb Bush’s Florida record has impressed many, but he left office eight years ago.
And grassroots conservatives have expressed scepticism, saying he has not since put forward a compelling conservative message.
Two issues could keep core conservatives away: his support for comprehensive immigration reform, which places him to the left of virtually all Republicans in the field on the issue, and his backing of Common Core, a set of national education standards loathed by conservatives. – AFP.
Bongani Ndlovu