George Bush smarts with Mitt Romney's charm

George Bush smarts with Mitt Romney's charm

“You don’t have to be the world’s policeman, but we have to be the world’s leader – and there’s a huge difference. This guy, this president and Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry, when someone disagrees with their nuanced approach – where it’s all kind of so sophisticated it makes no sense, you know what I’m saying? Big-syllable words and lots of fancy conferences and meetings – but we’re not leading, that creates chaos, it creates a more dangerous world.”

Jeb Bush, wealthy banking consultant and Florida ex-governor birthed from one of America's foremost modern political dynasties, tries to cornbread himself up a bit I'm not sure it's wise for Supposedly The Smarter Brother to carp about the nuanced approaches and big-syllable words and fancy meetings used by Obama and his administration in their diplomatic efforts with other nations. The Bush diplomatic doctrine can already be summed up as bomb those guys; carping that his dastardly ideological opponents use three-syllable words and go to meetings where arugula is served at lunch may endear him to voters who would like to see our international relations staged like a monster truck rally, but I question the wisdom of Jeb apparently embracing an anti-intellectual frame given that his campaign rollout has caused a great many other people to publicly wonder whether President Dubya was the deeper thinker of the two brothers this whole time.

All right, so the charge is that those other folks are too sophisticated in their foreign policy approach. How would he dumb it down? There are too many fancy words these days? Make a list, Jeb, of the ones that give you a particular bellyache. Which nuance is the upsetting part? This is a difficult set of complaints to pin down, unless the goal is just to assure voters that no, Jeb Bush doesn't cotton to all this book learning by America's top diplomatic voices.

This may or may not be part of a directed effort by Bush's team to respond to the emergence of (God help us) the xenophobic anti-foreign-everything Donald Trump as (God help us again) a top-tier challenger, an effort intended to reassure Republican primary voters that Jeb Bush can dumb his policy stances just as far down as you want him to, if that's what it takes to get the attention of the rubes these days. But it's far more likely that Jeb Bush just really, really doesn't like people who use big words.

