Republican president candidate Jeb Bush has scored the endorsement of South Carolina Sen. and onetime GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, NBC News reported. “We’re going to give Jeb the momentum he needs to win”, Graham stated before introducing Bush to the crowd. “Many of the people running for president are eerily silent on this issue”.
Advertisement
“Lindsey Graham is a patriot, he loves his country”, Bush said in North Charleston. He added that it’s not enough to criticize President Barack Obama, “you have to have an alternative to leading from behind” – something which he argued Bush has. The two were seen having drinks at a Manchester hotel just three days before Graham announced he was dropping out.
Graham took a shot at bombastic billionaire Trump, slamming his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States as disastrous. “Graham quit at O”.
“I think that Jeb, by any reasonable definition, is a fiscal and social conservative and above all others he understands conservatism when it comes to national security”, Graham said.
Graham said the vote in SC, which will follow Iowa’s caucuses on February 1 and New Hampshire’s primary on February 9, will reset the race.
Graham’s presidential campaign went nowhere, but as a senator from the early voting state of SC he hopes to still have some clout.
“This is a big deal nationally”. Bush, in recent days, had picked up over 20 of Graham’s former backers. While Bush’s brother and McCain waged a bitter primary fight in 2000, Jeb Bush backed McCain not long after Mitt Romney dropped out in 2008 and helped campaign for him.
For his part, Trump mocked Graham’s endorsement.
Advertisement
In making his announcement, Graham also said that a Bush rival, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, was, at 44, too young to be president. “And along with it come a lot of friends and supporters of his”, Bush said. After all, we will be told, the Palmetto State has always been the “firewall” for Republican Establishment candidates who got into trouble in Iowa or New Hampshire.
