It happened before the last presidential election and it’s happening again now: potential candidates are seeing old rumors unearthed and skeletons let loose from the closet. This time it’s Jeb Bush in the spotlight for a mistake he made back in 1996.
Younger brother of former President George W. Bush and son of former President George H. W. Bush, Jeb Bush is facing democratic criticism for marking his “race/ethnicity†as Hispanic on a voter-registration application in Miami Dade County in 1996. An innocent mistake? Probably.
Despite a public admission of his mistake on Twitter, democrats are drawing parallels between Bush’s action and the ruse put on by Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Senator who won the 2012 election despite the fact that she lied about her ethnicity for almost 10 years to advance her career as a law professor.
Warren claimed to be of Native American descent in the AALS Directory, a list law schools use for hiring. Her claim put her into the “Minority Law Teachers†category during a time in which schools were trying to hire a more diverse faculty. She kept up the ruse until she became a tenured professor at Harvard in 1995 and, unlike Bush, never apologized or admitted her “mistake.â€
Jeb Bush is expected to see lots of support from Hispanic voters if he becomes the GOP presidential candidate for the 2016 elections. Not only did he grow up in Texas and serve as Governor of Florida from 1999-2007 (both states have big Hispanic populations), but he also married a Mexican, spent a few years living in Venezuela, and speaks fluent Spanish. Let’s hope this faux pas doesn’t hurt his campaign.