Jeb Bush: Americans are losers

His communications director feels the same way

If the nascent Jeb Bush presidential campaign has a central message other than “I am entitled” it is that Americans are pretty stupid and they need their betters to run things for them. Take, for instance, Jeb Bush’s comments on the egregious loser-ness that being American entails. I touched on Jeb Bush’s stated ambivalence about the Americans and their ability to succeed in this piece. Drawing on the same article in The Atlantic, by David Frum, titled “Is Jeb Bush a Republican Obama?”, the National Review delves in an interview Bush gave:

Jeb’s dissatisfaction with America, and desire to change it to be more to his liking, is a theme he returns to often. Jeb’s enthusiasm for immigration (“the public-policy issue he cares about by far the most,” as Frum puts it) is “not only a positive judgment on the immigrants themselves,” Frum notes, but “it is also a negative judgment on native-born Americans.” Some examples:

• “They’re more entrepreneurial, they set up more business, they buy more homes, they’re more family-oriented, they work in jobs that in many cases are jobs that have gone unfilled” (at 39:40)
• “I think Detroit would do real well if we started repopulating it with young, aspirational people.” (45:20)
• “We have people that mope around thinking ‘my life is bad, my children will not have the same opportunities that I had.’ What a horrible notion in America, the most optimistic of places, and I think an economically driven immigration plan . . . would lift our spirits up dramatically.” (19:25)
• “The one way that we can rebuild the demographic pyramid is to fix a broken immigration system. . . . If we do this, we will rebuild our country in a way that will allow us to grow. If we don’t do it, we will be in decline, because the productivity of this country is dependent on young people that are equipped to be able to work hard….Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families and they have more intact families.” (12:25)

The truth or falsity of these claims is almost beside the point, because Jeb’s preference for immigrants over Americans is based on emotion, not reason.