South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham will endorse Jeb Bush in the Republican presidential nomination. The former governor is looking to make a SC, along with New Hampshire, a key state in his push for the Republican nomination.
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Bush, Graham said, is “Who I want to be commander in chief for that 1 percent fighting force”. Graham never garnered high poll numbers in the presidential contest – including in SC – but remains influential in the state.
“I’ll take all his enemies because he has a lot more friends”, Bush said. He is fifth in the national and most early primary state polls, including SC, according to averages compiled by Real Clear Politics.
Meanwhile, Trump kept up his offensive against Cruz Friday, calling him “strident” and labeling his remarks about “New York values” in the GOP debate “disgraceful”.
“I think Marco Rubio will be president of the United States one day”.
The larger context of Graham’s endorsement is that it is of a piece with his insistence that Trump and the other outsider candidates represent an existential threat to the Republican Party. But Jeb Bush stresses the need for a military and political strategy to play out hand-in-hand. At the last debate in which Graham participated, he famously praised another Bush.
At Friday’s endorsement event, he called his unsuccessful bid a disappointment. “A guy with 0% (Graham) endorses someone with 5% (Bush)?? what kind of strategy is this? no wonder Trump is winning”.
Meanwhile, the lookout for endorsements from U.S. Sen.
Bush called Graham “probably the most knowledgeable person on the Hill as it relates to national security, military, foreign policy”. And neither Iowa, where Mr Bush is a no-show, and New Hampshire, where he would have expected to do well but so far isn’t, looks likely to change that.
“Don’t run for president if you are going to double-down on insane”, he said.
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Challenged anew by Bernie Sanders, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is reverting to some of the same themes – even strikingly similar attack lines – from her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama.
