Updated 21.20 pm
FORMER FLORIDA GOVERNOR Jeb Bush has announced that he is running for President of the USA.
The brother of George W Bush and son of George HW Bush, Jeb has been positioning himself for some time for a run at the Republican nomination to run next year.
This evening he officially made his announcement to enter the race, just two days after Hillary Clinton made her first official speech of the campaign.
He vowed to get Washington “out of the business of causing problems” and to stay true to his beliefs.
“I will campaign as I would serve, going everywhere, speaking to everyone, keeping my word, facing the issues without flinching,” Bush said in his prepared remarks, opening his campaign at a rally near his south Florida home at Miami Dade College.
“In any language,” Bush said, “my message will be an optimistic one because I am certain that we can make the decades just ahead in America the greatest time ever to be alive in this world.”
Clinton is the overwhelming favourite to get the Democratic nomination and Bush has a 31% chance of getting the Republican one, according to PredictWise.
Such an outcome would give Bush a chance to avenge his father’s 1992 electoral drubbing at the hands of Clinton’s husband, Bill.
Bush joins the crowded Republican campaign in some ways in a commanding position.
The brother of one president and son of another, Bush has likely raised a record-breaking amount of money to support his candidacy and conceived of a new approach on how to structure his campaign, both aimed at allowing him to make a deep run into the GOP primaries.
But on other measures, early public opinion polls among them, he has yet to break out. While unquestionably one of the top-tier candidates in the GOP race, he is also only one of several in a capable Republican field that does not have a true front-runner.
Bush will have to overcome questions over his brother’s legacy. He said last month that he would have authorised an invasion of Iraq.
The series of bungled on-air responses, while potentially damaging for Bush in their own right, highlighted what will likely be one of the candidate’s distracting challenges.
First published 9.15am
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