Jeb Bush: Not Ready for Prime Time [Updated]

It’s not my biggest problem with Jeb Bush, but one of the issues with his candidacy is that he is badly out of shape as a candidate. He last ran a campaign in 2002, thirteen years ago. As a result, he isn’t sharp, and keeps making mistakes. A brutal case in point, as reported by the New York Times:

During an interview on Tuesday with religious conservatives, Mr. Bush suggested that the federal government had overfunded women’s health.

“I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,” Mr. Bush said at a Southern Baptist Convention event in Nashville.

For perspective, the federal government spends about $1 trillion a year on health care.

Amid a storm of Democratic mockery, Mr. Bush backtracked within a few hours, saying he had misspoken. …

Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, said the federal government should stop financing Planned Parenthood. He then veered off course, into a discussion of what could be done instead with the $500 million in federal funds the organization receives annually.

He should have said, Nothing should be done with it: we are $18 trillion in debt.

Bush’s ill-considered musing aloud was gleefully pounced on by the Democrats, who, of course, used it for fundraising. This email was headed (fictitiously) “cancer screenings cut in Minnesota”:

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In recent years, the Republican Party has suffered from far too many self-inflicted wounds. It is not enough to be well-intentioned. We need candidates who are good. At this point, Jeb Bush simply isn’t sharp enough for a successful presidential run.

UPDATE: Joni Ernst shows how it’s done. This is a fundraising appeal like the Democrats’, only truthful:

John,

Last week, I introduced legislation that would defund Planned Parenthood and redirect funding to other organizations that provide health services to women.

Of course, liberals like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren don’t let facts get in their way when it comes to loyally standing with Planned Parenthood, which has been exposed yet again yesterday in a new video for their gruesome practices of harvesting and potentially profiting from unborn babies’ organs.

Despite Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren’s outrageous claims, the reality is not a penny of federal money would be removed from funding women’s health services.

We’ve seen these tired old antics before from Hillary and her Washington friends who have spent the last several years trying to scare women into voting for them by falsely claiming Republicans were waging a “War on Women.” As I will remind Hillary: I am a woman and I’ve been to war – and their arguments are just plain wrong.

In fact, thanks to you and your hard work, I’m the first woman elected to Congress from Iowa and the first female combat veteran to serve in the U.S. Senate. And, with your help, I am the one leading the charge to redirect funds from Planned Parenthood to other organizations that provide women’s health services – like community health centers.

Our fight has just begun and I need your help. Please sign my petition and join me in calling out liberals and their blatant disregard and lack of compassion for women and their babies.

Politics is like anything else: it can be done either skillfully or unskillfully. Skillfully is better.

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