Former President George W. Bush predicted the odds of his brother Jeb Bush running for president in 2016 as a tossup at 50-50.
Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, is “wrestling with the decision” on whether to run for the Republican nomination for president, said George W. Bush, who noted that he knows his brother’s decision-making process “pretty well.”
“I think it’s 50-50,” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation” in a taped interview that aired Sunday. “[Jeb] and I are very close. At the same time he’s not here knocking on my door, you know, agonizing about the decision.”
“He knows exactly, you know, the ramifications on family,” George W. Bush said. “He’s seen his dad and his brother go through the presidency. I’d give it a tossup.”
Bush, who was promoting “41,” a book about his father, former President George H.W. Bush, said he would be “all in” if Jeb decides to get into the race and would either campaign for him on the stump or help him behind the scenes, whatever Jeb preferred.
“I know this about Jeb, he’s not afraid to succeed, he knows he can do the job, and he’s not afraid to fail,” George W. Bush said.
One of the main lessons he and Jeb Bush learned from their dad’s time in office, he said, was that you can “go into politics and still be a good father.”
When speaking about his father’s 1992 defeat to President Bill Clinton, George W. Bush said he took it “very hard” but it made it easier for him to run for the White House.
Bad reviews of his dad’s performance in office, he said, were particularly difficult, but when people criticized his tenure he didn’t feel as much “sting.”
“Being his son created a layer of asbestos,” he said. “My only thing is, how would my daughters react?”
He also denied what he labeled “political rumors” that he ordered the invasion of Iraq at least in part to finish the job begun by his father, who directed air and land attacks in 1990 to force Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, to withdraw from Kuwait after invading the oil-rich neighbor.
“I went in there as a result of a very changed environment because of Sept. 11 and the danger we were concerned about that the weapons [Hussein had] would be put in terrorists’ hands.”
“He was right, and I was right, too, in 2003,” he said, referring to his father’s decision to launch a bombing campaign in Iraq.
Weapons inspectors working with U.S. intelligence agencies never uncovered active chemical and nuclear weapons programs in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. A recent report in the New York Times said that the country is littered with chemical warheads dating back to the 1980s, most of which have lost their potency but still exposed nearly 600 servicemen to damaging chemical agents over the course of the last 11 years.
