George P. Bush: Conservatives Can Win Hispanic Vote ‘Without Selling Out Values’
December 15, 2016
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – The latest scion of one of America’s most powerful political dynasties is trying to convince voters he’s something other than what his famous surname suggests.
George P. Bush, Jeb Bush’s 37-year-old son who is a grandson of one former president and nephew of another, is launching his political career by running for Texas’ little-known but powerful land commissioner post.
But rather than campaigning on the mainstream Republicanism embodied by the family name, Bush says he’s “a movement conservative” more in line with the tea party.
As if to underscore the point, he says he draws the most inspiration not from the administrations of his grandfather, George H. W. Bush, or his uncle, George W. Bush, but from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who engineered the 1994 Republican takeover of that chamber.
“On social questions, national defense, economic issues, I’m a strong conservative,” Bush told The Associated Press.
That kind of statement helps make him the latest — and perhaps one of the more unlikely — faces in the parade of Republicans marching even farther to the right in already fiercely conservative Texas.