A spokesperson for all-but-certain Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said a 2009 Florida voter registration form which listed Bush as “Hispanic” was the result of a “paperwork error.”
The New York Times reported Monday that, “In a 2009 voter-registration application, obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, Mr. Bush marked Hispanic in the field labeled ‘race/ethnicity.'”
Asked about the form, Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell answered, “It’s unclear where the paperwork error was made. The governor’s family certainly got a good laugh out of it. He is not Hispanic.”
Bush himself responded to the story Monday morning after his son, Jeb Bush, Jr., tweeted “LOL — come on dad, think you checked the wrong box #HonoraryLatino.” In response, Jeb Bush tweeted, “My mistake! Don’t think I’ve fooled anyone!”
Some observers have pointed to Bush’s “Hispanic” form as an equivalent to Elizabeth Warren’s claim to be Native American. But there’s no real comparison; Bush was registering to vote and did not stand to gain from any preferential treatment for belonging to a minority group. “Paperwork error” is a more likely explanation.
Still, the fact that Bush’s voter registration form listed him as Hispanic fits into a different narrative, one that relates to Bush’s appeal to Latino voters. Bush has said his family speaks Spanish at home and indeed chose to live in Miami because of its Hispanic character. And there was more. The Atlantic’s David Frum has noted that Jeb Bush “moved away first from Texas, and then from his family’s patrician identity as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”
Frum’s article, “Is Jeb Bush a Republican Obama?”, includes a portion of an interview Bush gave promoting his 2013 book Immigration Wars. The interviewer noted Bush’s personal experiences with immigration — Bush’s wife Columba is originally from Mexico — and asked, “In the end, you’re still a WASP, right?”
“I’ve actually converted to Catholicism,” Bush answered. “So White Anglo Saxon Protestant — I’m whatever a W-A-S-C would be. I’m a practicing Catholic and proud of it, and I’m a converted one, principally because this was the faith of my wife, and I wanted our children to grow up in a non-mixed marriage, I guess. And it’s been a real source of strength for me, actually. So, no longer a WASP.”
The “Hispanic” voter registration form was obviously an error, but it does underscore the fact that Jeb Bush chose to live a very different life from his famous family.
