On his blog Tuesday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took more than a few shots at Jeb Bush -- or "Jeb!" as he's branded himself -- for using economic growth in Florida as the foundation for his presidential campaign.
As Krugman noted, Jeb! considers presiding over Florida when its economy was bolstered by "a huge housing bubble" as evidence that he holds "the secrets of [economic] growth."
"It’s as if a bunch of guys who are only 5'7" (my height, btw) were running around in the firm belief that they’re all 6'2"" he wrote, even though "[n]othing at all in the historical record supports this belief." He added that the evidence Jeb! is using to support this belief comes from the Bush Center.
But Jeb! isn’t just drawing on the general conservative growth delusion. He’s piggybacking completely on his brother’s institute, which has a much-derided 4-percent growth project. FYI, the institute’s founding executive director was James K. Glassman, described by the Bush Center’s site as having “written three books on investing.” Indeed, and one of those books was “Dow 36,000.”
So Jeb! insists that he’s not his brother — he’s even replaced his last name with a punctuation mark — and is portrayed by sympathetic reporters as the serious, wonky member of the family that must not be named. But the best he can come up with in his campaign launch is some lukewarm leftovers from his brother’s already pretty sad excuse for a research institute.
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