Jeb Bush on Thursday suggested rioters in Baltimore should have been met with more force, and he compared the now-famous mother seen slapping her son for participating in the mayhem to his own mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush.
"I think my mom and the woman who was bringing her child back home have a lot in common," Bush said, referring to Internet smash Toya Graham. "I admire her a lot for doing what she did, Bush said during a National Review event in Washington. It was a nice visual symbol of what needs to be restored.
Bush asserted the broken window policing policy has been proven "completely successful" and said there needs to be a "certainty of punishment to create order and security."
He said Freddie Gray, the man who died in police custody, "is not just a statistic," and added that the riots were "disturbing.
In this case there are a lot of people who are going to suffer because of what happened.
But Bush also argued that conservatives have an opportunity to address poverty. Obama's approach, he said, "is to say 'Conservatives havent offered up enough money to give me to be able to create programs to let people be successful I think we need to be engaged in this debate as conservatives and say that theres a bottom up approach and it starts with building a capacity so people can achieve earned success (by) having higher expectations and higher accountability and dramatically different kinds of schools."
ALSO, interviewer Rich Lowry asked Bush a couple questions that involved Marco Rubio. Bush more or less dodged an answer about the amendment Rubio is pushing on the Senate's Iran bill, that would require Iran to recognize Israel. He also did not provide a clear response when asked about Rubio's child tax credit plan, which has drawn criticism from the right. But Bush did push back on Rubio's assertion (though Lowry didn't invoke Rubio's name) that governors aren't prepared for foreign policy. Bush tossed out Ronald Reagan.
"You can be prepared from Day One from being a governor," Bush said.
Rubio has not commented on the Baltimore situation.
Poster Comment:
Yeah... but Jeb's Mom had the Secret Service to protect her from the kid fighting back.