Jeb Bush ratchets up attacks on Donald Trump
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is trying to take a more forceful stand against the party's frontrunner, Donald Trump.
Speaking to an audience of veterans in Colorado, Bush declared again, "it's going to be really hard for me to be lectured to by anybody about the politics of immigration" when asked about his use of the term "anchor baby" and his clarification on Monday that the problem was more related to "Asian people."
That was a response to Trump, who has been taunting him on Twitter since Bush made the assertion about Asians Monday.
Asians are very offended that JEB said that anchor babies applies to them as a way to be more politically correct to hispanics. A mess!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2015
The former Florida governor charged that Trump's plan would "round people up," saying that it did not "embrace American values" that he thought "should be respected."
Trump also criticized Bush for referring to his proposed border wall as a "fence."
Jeb Bush just talked about my border proposal to build a "fence." It's not a fence, Jeb, it's a WALL, and there's a BIG difference!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2015
Bush's campaign is adjusting to possibility that Trump has some staying power in the GOP campaign, and he's been spending a little more time on countering his attacks. Bush mocked Trump's persistent description of himself as "very successful," telling the audience, "Mr. Trump believes that you can just round people up. And that it's just an easy thing to do, because he's a successful guy, and he'll just have successful people to do it. And it will all work out."
In reference to the billionaire's proposed wall, Bush called it "a great soundbite" but "not defensible in terms of a practical policy."
He also promised the audience that he would work 'with passion, with energy," quantifying it to "16 to 18 hours a day" like he did as governor of the state of Florida, perhaps in response to Trump's repeated accusation that Bush has "low energy."
Citing his bilingual background, his long marriage to a Mexican-American Columba Bush, and his work on immigration issues, Bush rejected criticism that he was insensitive or wrong on the matter. On his "Asian people" comment, Bush argued that he was "talking about a narrow casted system of fraud where people are bringing pregnant women in to have babies to get birthright citizenship."
Democrats like Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, which has a large Asian American population, have called on Bush to "retract his statements and apologize." The Republican reiterated that he thought birthright citizenship was a "noble thing we should do."
David Ortiz, a young veteran at the event who was wounded in Operation Enduring Freedom and in a wheel chair, urged Bush to "work with leveler heads to fix immigration." Ortiz cited his family's immigrant background (his mother came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 15) and military service (his grandfather served in World War II, his dad was a B-1 bomber pilot) as the kind of contribution immigrants could make to the United States.