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WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. — Nearly two weeks after canceling a campaign event scheduled the morning after the deadly attack on a South Carolina church, Jeb Bush on Monday called the Confederate battle flag a “racist” symbol, reflecting the new Republican normal in a Southern primary state vastly altered by the racially motivated killings.

The flag was one of “the symbols that have divided the South in many ways, the symbols that were used in most recent modern history, perhaps not at the beginning of the time, but the symbols were racist,” Mr. Bush told an interracial crowd of about 200 people at a $300 million pharmaceuticals facility here.

“And if you are trying to lean forward rather than live in the past, you are trying to eliminate the barriers that create disagreements, and so I did,” he said, explaining his decision as the governor of Florida to move the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds to a museum

He then applauded Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina “for doing more or less the exact same thing under a lot of pressure.”

That was a considerably stronger statement about the flag than what Mr. Bush and other leading Republican candidates said in the early days after the June 17 shootings, when Mr. Bush tread gently on the issue by referring to his decision in Florida and saying he was confident that South Carolina would “do the right thing.” Mr. Bush also initially said that he didn’t know the motives of the man charged in the shooting, before ultimately calling him “racist.”

That was before a political sea change made taking down the flag the safe position here. But when it came to the other major changes in American society that have occurred in quick succession since the shootings, Mr. Bush’s answers reflected his struggle to cast himself both as the common-sense Republican who can reach out in a general election and a candidate who is sufficiently conservative to get through his party’s primary contest.

Asked at a small news conference here about the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage and the proposal of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to hold retention elections for the justices, Mr. Bush said he was “disappointed in the ruling” but did not support retention elections.

“I do think traditional marriage is the hallmark of a just, loving society, and nothing, frankly, in this court ruling changes my views about that,” Mr. Bush said, adding that there needed to be in America “room for people to act on their religious conscience” and making sure “we have a just society where people aren’t discriminated against because of their having long-term relationships irrespective of sexual orientation.”

He was also blunt on the question of guns (“Florida leads the nation” on concealed carry permits, he said) and on China’s building a military base on a coral reef in the South China Sea (“The Chinese are extraordinarily emboldened”).

When informed of a less consequential development, that NBC had fired Donald J. Trump, with whom he has feuded, Mr. Bush smiled. “Literally? For the show?” he said. “He’s worth nine billion bucks, so he’ll be able to survive.”

Mr. Bush spent part of the morning meeting with dozens of evangelical pastors in a hotel conference room in Charleston, where he said he talked about “the role of faith in American life post-Supreme Court decision.” When pressed whether he and the pastors had talked about the shooting, he said, “we did, a little bit” before returning to the comfort of his flag position, which he said they “appreciated.”

Mr. Bush left the meeting with pastors and drove two hours to a new facility for the Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corporation, not far from the single-wide mobile home where the man charged with killing nine people at a Bible study in Charleston spent his last days before his arrest. But this manicured industrial complex next to a vast Amazon distribution center seemed a world away.

The chief executive of Nephron, Lou Kennedy, led Mr. Bush on a tour of the plant, which produces generic respirator products. Mr. Bush asked questions including, “How long you take to build it?” and “This is the raw material?”

Upon learning that the factory relied heavily on state-of-the-art German machines, Mr. Bush said, “We’ve got to get back in the game” and declared “Schubert!” in a German accent when he saw some Schubert packaging machines. When Ms. Kennedy offered him the option of putting on a hair net and touring the factory floor, Mr. Bush, whose father benefited from a television ad mocking the 1988 Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, for wearing a tank helmet, said, “No helmets.”

He explained to his guide: “Trust me, if you want to make national news, put on a hair net.”

And during his 45-minute question-and-answer session with workers and local guests, Mr. Bush also played it safe. And that included not only taking a strong, explicit position on the Confederate flag, but suggesting that the flag of the pro-slavery South “perhaps” did not begin as a racial symbol.

“We eliminated all of the controversy,” he said of his decision in Florida, adding, “I think it was the right thing to do.”