There was nothing compassionate about Jeb's conservatism in the mid '90s, which is probably why he didn't win his first gubernatorial bid in 1994. Eric Bradner
reports on Bush's musings from that race about ways to get women off welfare:
"If people are mentally and physically able to work, they should be able to do so within a two-year period. They should be able to get their life together and find a husband, find a job, find other alternatives in terms of private charity or a combination of all three," Bush said. [...]
In 1994, when Republican primary opponent Jim Smith hit Bush for those comments in a television commercial, Bush didn't back away in a September news conference.
"How you get on welfare is by not having a husband in the house -- let's be honest here," he said.
"Men are not on welfare, that's the point," Bush said. "That's the point -- men are not on AFDC."
Wow. Tell us how you really feel, Jeb.
Turns out Bush was wrong about that last point anyway—AFDC being the acronym for the hotly debated federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
A "small percentage" of the program's support goes to men, the official said, and about 5,000 of the families that received benefits were headed by a male and a female, compared to 250,000 families total collecting benefits.
This whole episode happened before Bush put pen to paper for the revelatory passage from his 1995 book,
Profiles in Character. One might imagine that after losing his race, Jeb was doing some real soul searching.
Here's what he came up with:
"One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame. Many of these young women and young men look around and see their friends engaged in the same irresponsible conduct. Their parents and neighbors have become ineffective at attaching some sense of ridicule to this behavior. There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out of wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful."
Boy, those were the good ol' days, weren't they?