Jeb! fail
MIAMI – Jeb! Bush can’t outrun history. The former Florida governor is campaigning as newly “joyful”, but joy can’t mask facts.
The GOP presidential candidate is re-made, we are led to believe. He does look lean and mean enough to compete with younger contenders, but to vault ahead of historical fact is beyond the capacity of any make-over.
Yesterday, Jeb attacked Hillary Clinton who, as secretary of state, he charges “stood by” as the situation in Iraq deteriorated.
In fact Jeb played a central role as an agent that propelled the United States to the biggest waste of American treasure and taxpayer money in history: the election of George W. Bush to the White House in 2000.
As governor directing the disenfranchisement of voters, Jeb Bush wasn’t “joyful”. He was a newly minted governor obsessed with technology, a grim and determined conniver who directed a Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, and a state subcontractor to scrub voter registration rolls by setting database selection criteria to benefit his brother against the Democratic candidate for president, Al Gore.
The facts have been recounted in many reports over the years and, most recently, in a report by Ari Berman for Moyers and Company, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement”: “… the U.S. Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters — almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory — could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.”
The election of George W. Bush put Americans on a collision course with truth, and “outcome determinative” results that cost the nation several trillion dollars. Bush “truthiness”, for example, that Saddam Hussein of Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction; the false pretense that led the U.S. to war in 2003.
Much has been made of Jeb’s stumbles in response to questions whether he would have taken the United States to war with Iraq in 2003. He now says, based on available evidence he wouldn’t. But Jeb! had the data about expunging Florida’s voters and he did it.
Today Jeb! is trying to pin Hillary Clinton as “inattentive”, but to prove that point the GOP needs to raise the specter of conspiracy. It is a long shot, stirred by the Fox News commentariat that otherwise refuses to chew on the bone that Jeb Bush, in 1999, placed his hand over the hand of Katherine Harris, his Secretary of State, and instructed her to push the button that disenfranchised tens of thousands of Florida voters, tilting the 2000 presidential to his brother, George W. Bush.
There is no speculation in that, no amount of reinterpretation to wash the epic fail. It may seem clear to Jeb’s donor base that he is the most capable of delivering the protections they want — whether for country, for God or private profit — but for the rest of America, Jeb! can’t outrun history.
Alan Farago writes as Gimleteye in his blog Eye on Miami. For the past 25 years he has written, worked and volunteered to advance civic engagement and issues related to the environment and politics.
(From the Eye on Miami blog)
