Ryan Ray
Yes, Jeb Bush gave a well-covered speech at the Detroit Economic Club about economic inequality, but he also gave Ron Fournier of National Journal something else: an unconstrained semi-soliloquy reminiscent of a dorm room bull session at Washington & Lee, in which Jeb talked animatedly about his first political love: ideas of the Right.
If his brother, former President George W. Bush, was a compassionate conservative, Bush is trying to be a 21st-century conservative — a center-right leader who talks more about reforming government than shrinking it, even if the results are the same.
Bush tells me about Hernando de Soto Polar, the Peruvian economist who specializes in the so-called informal economy (removed from taxes and government oversight). The economist documented frustrations of entrepreneurs across the globe whose innovations are crushed by crony capitalism and government monopolies, including a Tunisian man who in 2013 set himself afire in protest. “We’re not Tunisia by any stretch of the imagination,” Bush says, but “we’re getting more and more complicated.”
“This should not be an ideological question,” Bush continues, before slipping into the clunky language of Peruvian economists and high-tech disrupters. “Transparencies about how we create rules around society have to be a part of the solution for people to be successful.”
Bush went on, effusively, to discuss the “sharing economy,” radical transparency and a host of innovators and disrupters who turn the former Florida governor into an excitable rambler. But that’s not to say he entirely left behind the usual pablum reserved for politicos:
Bush acknowledges that he doesn’t have those answers — not yet. But he says the solutions certainly won’t come from the White House. “This president, who is really the first post-, I mean, definitely when people think of Barack Obama, they think of him as a 21st-century man. Yeah, young and dynamic. His campaign embraced technologies like no one else had. But his policies are in most ways a reflection of the 20th century. It’s almost like Hubert Humphrey has come back.”
I suspect Bush is road-testing the seeds of an attack against Hillary Rodham Clinton, the most likely 2016 Democratic nominee. “Certainly, the health care law was a good example of that. The industrial laws, the use of the Department of Labor, the encumbering that is making it harder for people to have start-ups — all these things are now really becoming a challenge,” Bush says
“The answer isn’t no government,” he says. “The answer is smarter, effective government.”
Fournier and Jeb’s dialogue seemingly went into the wee hours, even growing a little wistful as they reflected on their surroundings.
Prodding, I ask whether Democrats and liberal policies are the cause of Detroit’s demise. It’s a softball question that most GOP politicians would take a whack at. Bush lets it pass. “I don’t know that that matters anymore,” he said.
What matters? “The inability to transform and to change and adapt to the world that we’re in — and the embracing and the hanging on to the old world order that was never going to stay, because nothing ever does.”
