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| Image by J.Scott Applewhite/AP. |
Jeb! to Declare Presidential Run, Playing Down His Surname
MIAMI — Jeb! (who uses only one name),
a son and brother of presidents, formally entered the race for the
White House on Monday by portraying himself as the most accomplished
leader in the 2016 field, declaring war on Washington’s political
culture and insisting that his former family name of Bush gave him no unique claim to
the Oval Office.
As
his mother, Barbara, a former first lady, looked on, Mr. Jeb! directly
confronted the central doubt looming over his candidacy: that he
presents the latest incarnation of a tired dynasty and thinks himself
entitled to the Republican nomination.
“Not
a one of us deserves the job by right of résumé, party, seniority,
family or family narrative,” he told a crowd of 3,000 supporters in a
community college’s gymnasium. “It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s
test.”
Mr. Jeb!, whose tenure as governor of Florida was marked by the
privatization of traditional state services, vowed to “take Washington —
the static capital of this dynamic country — out of the business of
causing problems.”
Nah, just for fun.
NYTimes commenter AR:
Fun fact: The Republican Party hasn't won a presidential election without having somebody named Bush or Nixon on its national ticket (as presidential or vice-presidential nominee) since the year 1928.
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| Stump speech. Photo by Rob Strong (Dartmouth '04). |
Since you got into Dartmouth, you spent one spring break unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers. You spent another exciting summer interning at a congressional office in Washington, providing your boss with policy advice and sexual tension. You tell your friends you like Kendrick Lamar, but secretly you like Jason Mraz.
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| Jason Mraz |
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| Kendrick Lamar. Apparently the Dartmouth kids like Mraz better because he has a smaller head. |
I had a student who was a young Army officer. During one of his tours, he had a terrible superior officer who gave him nothing but negative feedback. During those 18 months, he said he could not rely on external validation or criticism from outside to get a sense of whether he was doing a good job. He had to come up with his own criteria to judge himself. That’s the agency moment.The race is not to the gritty:
The gritty reality of love involves the particular gifts and foibles of this or that partner or beloved. This particularity was captured in one of my all-time favorite wedding toasts, by Leon Wieseltier at the wedding of Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein.... But there is another side to it which is poetic and transcendent and idealistic and universal. This is side that Taylor Swift sings about.("I stay up too late/ Got nothing in my brain/ That's what people say/ That's what people say/ I go on too many dates/ But I can't make them stay/ That's what people say")
Spoiler alert—The Road to Character turns out to be wrong:
I wrote the book because I wanted to understand how some people become deeply good and radiate a sort of inner light. When I finished the book, I believed that goodness and character comes from internal struggle against your own weakness. But in the months since, I’ve come to see that I put too much emphasis on the individual exercise of character building. Becoming a good, moral person is not being able to control your temptations; it’s about this ability to make commitments.
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