2016 Jeb turns on the snark The experienced, accessible and disciplined candidate gets sarcastic in South Carolina.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Jeb Bush said he’d give John Kasich a shout-out from the debate stage if the Ohio governor doesn’t make the cut. He publicly lamented the media’s obsession with Donald Trump. He even mocked the notion that his family lineage means he’s been waiting his whole life to become president.

“It’s not like I’ve been kind of in some test tube waiting for my chance now, the third Bush,” he quipped. “I’ve actually had a life.”


The 200 people who showed up here Tuesday afternoon got a glimpse of a free-wheeling candidate, a snarky, substantive former governor who’s not afraid to think out loud or who gets lost without his talking points.

Bush is following through on his own oft-repeated promise to show “who I am.” Turns out, he’s not just an experienced, accessible and transparent candidate, attributes he takes great pains to highlight.

He’s also remarkably sarcastic.

Answering a question about whether South Carolina native son Lindsey Graham and other long-shot candidates should be onstage for the first debate next month, Bush demurred and sympathized with debate organizers, who’ve closed the debate to candidates outside the top 10 in national polls.

“If every candidate got allowed on the stage in a 90-minute debate, we’d all have like four minutes of discussion,” Bush said. “I just want to be in it. I’m looking forward to it. I hope I make it.”

Bush, of course, has held steady atop the GOP field, so his participation has never been in doubt; moreover, he has already devoted several hours to debate prep, something his humble affectation sought to mask.

As he went on, Bush remarked that it’s “odd” that Kasich, who became the 16th candidate to enter the GOP primary field just hours earlier, might miss the cut for the first debate, which is being held in the Ohio governor’s own state.

“I’ll give a shout-out to Kasich if he’s not on it,” Bush said, delivering the line with glibness that was almost Kasich-esque, before turning back to poke fun at himself.

“Clearly if people thought I was going to be a front-runner, I proved that wrong, didn’t I?” he said.

As he began with a recap of his Monday speech introducing a number of policies aimed at cleaning up Washington, Bush lamented that it was overshadowed by Trump.

“It got some coverage,” he said of the speech. “Not as much as Donald Trump.”

When the conversation boomeranged back to Trump, Bush, whose expression visibly soured as the questioner spoke, tried to tone the sarcasm down, looking to separate the quarter of GOP primary voters currently backing Trump — voters he doesn’t want to alienate — while continuing to harshly criticize the current front-runner’s tone.

“I respect the sentiments that people feel when they hear Trump talk,” Bush said. “The problem with Mr. Trump’s language is it’s divisive, it’s ugly, it’s mean-spirited.”

But as he spoke, Bush interrupted himself, joking, as an aside, that he’s not sure how to refer to him.

“What am I supposed to call the guy anyway? Donald? I’ll just call him Mr. Trump,” Bush said, before coming back to his main point.

“If we embrace this language of divisiveness and ugliness, we’ll never win. We’ll never win. We have to appeal to people’s higher aspirations or we’ll lose elections over and over and over again.”

The irony, of course, is that Bush’s calls for a more uplifting, positive tone and his other points are often delivered with a caustic edge — it’s just more subtle than Trump’s characteristic bombast.

He tucked a snarky dig at Hillary Clinton into an answer about his accessibility on the trail.

“You’re not going to see me rope-lining myself off with people. You’re going to see how I campaign, press gaggles everywhere, Q&As everywhere,” Bush said. “I campaign like Jeb, and people let me have it.”

When one of the five local journalists brought in to question him delivered an unexpected gut punch — “The last time we had a Bush in the White House, the economy collapsed,” he said — Bush didn’t let it go, but he responded with aplomb.

“There are a lot of reasons why we had the financial collapse,” he said. “The implication that somehow my brother was primarily responsible for that is, I think, a bit harsh, but I’ll just let it pass.”

Bush’s levity can be viewed as a defense mechanism of sorts, but he doesn’t go to it every time a question puts him on the defensive.

When asked to square his criticism of Trump for saying John McCain isn’t a war hero with his support for the swift boating of John Kerry’s Vietnam record during his brother’s 2004 reelection bid, Bush’s tone was sober as he ignored the question of whether the situations are analogous.

In his straightforward explanation, Bush defended writing a letter thanking Col. Bud Day, one of the veterans who George W. Bush’s campaign enlisted to question Kerry’s war record, by emphasizing the heroism of Day, a former POW and Purple Heart recipient who has since died.

“If he says that there was a problem, I believe him,” Bush said. “He’s a great Floridian and a great American, so I wrote him a note thanking him for his service. I’m not going to change my beliefs about that at all.”