GOLDSBORO, NEW HAMPSHIRE — It has not been a week to inspire much dignity in the Jeb Bush campaign. First, the former Florida Governor had to politely ask a crowd assembled to hear him speak clap at the designated times in his speech, and just this morning he was rebuffed in an attempt to help “a nice old lady,” as he’d later tell staff and reporters, cross the street.
“She just looked at me,” Jeb said, “asked if I was ‘that Bush guy,’ and then shook her said and said, ‘No thanks, I don’t need anyone from your family helping me.'” Bush, who is vying for the Republican Party’s nomination in the General Election later this year, said he was “taken aback” at first because he’d always been “brought up to believe the Bush family is always there to help, and we never screw it up, at all.”
Jeb told reporters that he asked the woman several times if she was sure she didn’t want any help. “It was a busy intersection we were about to cross,” Bush said, “and I just didn’t want her falling down or something bad happening to her.” Try as he might though, the old lady would not accept his help, and even decided to walk another way to her destination, Jeb related to reporters, because he “was hounding her about letting [him] be the one to help her.”
“I won’t lie, I was feeling pretty depressed about it all,” Jeb said, “when all of a sudden another old lady appeared at the same crosswalk. This was a sign from the almighty One, True, American God that I should keep trying, I knew it!” Bush says that when he got up the gumption to try again, because as he put it, “We Bush’s don’t know the meaning of giving up, even when it’s plainly obvious we have cocked it all up and it’ll take years and years to fix what we’ve done, while we go and paint portraits or something. ”
The second older lady, Bush said, was much more receptive to his offer. “I offered to help, and she accepted it, even after I told her I was a Bush,” Jeb said, adding that the woman “didn’t seem to remember who the Bush family was” and that “she said, ‘Oh hell, what could it hurt, letting a Bush try to help me.'” That’s when Jeb said he was “overcome with the feeling of pride and success” and he took her by the hand and began walking her across the street.
He walked her right into an oncoming Mini Cooper, which was getting read to turn right. Jeb had failed to take note of the “Walk/Don’t Walk” sign’s status, and as he put it, he “cocked it all up.” With a sheepish grin he told reporters, “Maybe I’ll still to being president, since helping people across the street is obviously way too complicated. But being a president? Shit, if my brother could be a co-president, I know I could do it too.”
Jeb Bush is currently finishing at the bottom of polling for the GOP nomination, and he fared terribly in the Iowa caucus earlier this week, losing to Sen. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio and even retired neurosurgeon and current narcoleptic, Ben Carson.
