Jeb Bush hit the TV talk shows Sunday, mainly to promote his book on immigration and explain his apparent shift on any 'path to citizenship.' But the question of 2016 inevitably came up, and the former Florida governor tried to deflect any notion that he might run.
Is the world ready for a third President Bush, the possibility of barely more than a generation that would include 20 years of Bushes as the nation’s chief executive, commander-in-chief, leader of the free world?
Try as he might, former Florida governor could not avoid that question as he made the rounds of the TV news shows Sunday morning.
"I've decided to defer any consideration of it until the proper time to make those kinds of considerations," Mr. Bush demurred on CNN's "State of the Union."
"My big decision was to force myself not to think about it until it's time, the proper time to think about it, which is out into the future," Bush said on CBS’s "Face the Nation." "We just had an election, four years is a long way from now, and I think it’s better to stay focused on the things that I'm doing now."
What he’s focusing on now – and the official reason for his sitting down for five interviews – is promoting his new book. Titled “Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution,” it was coauthored by Clint Bolick, described by the Washington Post as “an activist conservative lawyer.”
Everybody knows the GOP lost a huge majority of the Hispanic vote last year. Today, Republicans are scrambling to repair relations with that growing portion of the electorate – moving rapidly away from Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” answer to illegal immigration toward a more benign if not humane attitude, including talk by some of a “path to citizenship.”