Bush showed a lighter side during a brief Q-and-A after his speech with the Urban League’s president, Marc Morial, when discussing his efforts as governor to free up compliance officers to focus on other areas. It says the process is slower because of intense scrutiny by U.S. intelligence agencies to ensure that emails from her private server don’t contain any sensitive or classified government secrets.
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Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are being asked by one of the nation’s largest African-American civil rights organizations to offer a vision for saving America’s cities.
One of those mistakes that perhaps Bush reflected on was his comment on the campaign trail that year that he would do “probably nothing” for the black community if he were to be elected.
“So many people could do so much better in life if we could come together and get even a few big things right in government”, Bush was to say.
Increased school choice was another long-term impact of Bush’s time as Florida governor. “It’s a record I’ll gladly compare with anyone else in the field”.
That includes Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who for the first time of the 2016 campaign appeared with Bush at the same event.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have been among the most vocal critics of Obama’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with Cuba. While Bush was governor, the state purged the voter rolls in a way that was denounced by black leaders as aimed at African-Americans.
Still, beneath the avowed high-mindedness is a cold reality: had Bush criticized Clinton before this audience, he would have risked getting booed. “And yes, while that’s partly a legacy of discrimination that stretches back to the start of our nation, it is also because of discrimination that is still ongoing”, highlighted Clinton. And she said anyone who seeks the presidency has a responsibility to deal with those inequities. You and I have to call the situation what it is.
His speech today at the Urban League was meant to sound inclusive, sympathetic, and, with his references to systemic inequality, enlightened. “They can’t rise if the minimum wage is too low to live on, they can’t rise if their governor makes it harder for them to get a college education, and you cannot seriously talk about the right to rise and support laws that deny the right to vote”, Clinton said. African-Americans are disproportionately more likely to lack a photo ID? Among those in attendance was the Rev. Windell Rodgers, a black Democrat from Greenville, who is supporting Bush in the state’s early voting Southern primary.
“The willingness to be held accountable was what really struck me“, Kalima said.
Should Bush capture the GOP’s presidential nomination, repeating the campaign strategy he credits for his wins in Florida could be essential to his general election success in 2016.
Bush and other Republicans are grappling with a demographic challenge. Attorneys for neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who shot and killed the teenage Martin in 2012 and was acquitted of murder, considered using a “stand your ground” defense in his case.
He did not directly address the rash of police shootings of unarmed black men that dominated discussions at the Urban League conference this week. He praised Bush as “a different” Republican in an op-ed piece published Thursday in the Orlando Sentinel. Bush is among a small slew of 2016 candidates who have portrayed themselves as White House hopefuls able to woo nontraditional Republican voters.
“The policies I am advocating can ultimately receive bipartisan support in Congress and become law”, Bush wrote.
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Bush told the crowd that he had changed as a person and as a politician following his 1994 gubernatorial loss. And also made a very broad claim about their status: “Among minority children, Florida saw the greatest gains anywhere in the United States”. He also talked about his experience with Fair in building the charter school in one of Miami’s poorest communities in the 1990s.
