Jeb Bush didn’t keep his audience in suspense, announcing within four minutes of taking the stage in his adopted home of Miami that he is indeed a candidate for the Republican nomination for president.
Bush made a direct appeal to conservatives in his speech at Miami Dade Community College, echoing Ronald Reagan’s emphasis on getting Washington out of the way of free markets and personal liberty while implicitly slamming President Obama and congressional Democrats.
“We will get back on the side of free enterprise and freedom for all Americans,” @JebBush says.
“We will take Washington—the static capital of this dynamic country—out of the business of causing problems,” he said. “We will get back on the side of free enterprise and freedom for all Americans.”
The former Florida governor said it’s time to “get serious about limited government” and to “build our future on solvency instead of borrowed money.” As he has for months, he said his aim is 4 percent economic growth a year “and the 19 million jobs that come with it.”
He went off-script briefly near the end of his speech, responding to hecklers by taking a poke at both Obama and some of his own conservative critics and promising that “the next president” will achieve “meaningful immigration reforms” through Congress, “not by executive order.”
Bush, 62, wearing an open-collared blue shirt and no jacket, sought to appeal to Americans who don’t see government as fostering the sort of economic and social conditions in which they and their families can thrive—or “rise,” as Bush and his political action committee put it.
He said:
We will take command of our future once again in this country. We will lift our sights again, make opportunity common again, get events in the world moving our way again.
Bush, the son and brother of past presidents, has spent the past six months in early primary states and elsewhere making the case that he is his “own man” while asserting he loves and honors both the former, George H.W. Bush, and the latter, George W. Bush.
