https://youtube.com/watch?v=JYAXncCzbG8
Seeking to distance himself from an extensive – and at times awkward — family legacy, likely 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush told a crowd of foreign policy experts that he is his “own man” whose views are shaped by his “own thinking and experiences.”
The former Florida Republican governor spoke on Wednesday at Chicago’s Council of Global Affairs, where he sharply criticized President Obama’s response to Islamic terrorism and Russian aggression.
But Bush also assured his audience that, should he win the presidency in 2016, his foreign policy decisions would not necessarily emulate those made by his father, George H. W. Bush, and his brother, George W. Bush, during their respective turns in the White House.
“Look, just for the record one more time, I love my brother, I love my dad,” he said. ”And I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions that they had to make. But I am my own man, and my views are shaped by my own thinking and my own experiences.”
Bush compared the first Gulf War and 2003 invasion of Iraq — the key foreign policy challenges of his father and brother’s terms – to prospective challenges he would have to face as president.
“In the 1991 Gulf War timeframe, hardly anyone knew that the Internet existed or who al-Qaeda was,” he said. “In 2003, at the beginning of the liberation of Iraq, neither Twitter nor ISIS existed. New circumstances require new approaches.”