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" Last week, Jeb (!) Bush gave an interview to the Manchester Union-Leader -- Nice job, McQuaid! -- in which he said something that should hang around his neck like a dead raccoon for the entire rest of his campaign.  &amp;quot;My aspiration for the country -- and I believe we can achieve it -- is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see,&amp;quot; he told the newspaper. &amp;quot;Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That&amp;#039;s the only way we&amp;#039;re going to get out of this rut that we&amp;#039;re in.&amp;quot;  This was so tone-deaf that it made Willard Romney sound like Mahalia Jackson. Democratic politicians immediately pounced; Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced again today in her big speech on the economy. However, Jeb (!) almost instantly started trying to walk his quote back and, in doing so, came up with one of the lamest alibis ever.  &amp;quot;If we&amp;#039;re going to grow the economy people need to stop being part-time workers, they need to be having access to greater opportunities to work,&amp;quot; he told reporters. He faulted the Obama administration and congressional Democrats for enacting a series of policies that have made it harder for businesses to create jobs and for Americans to work longer hours. &amp;quot;You can take it out of context all you want, but high-sustained growth means that people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours and that by our success, they have money, disposable income for their families to decide how they want to spend it rather than getting in line and being dependent on government,&amp;quot; Bush said.  This is just inches away from actual English. (Maybe I&amp;#039;m confused by all the big words in there.) If Jeb (!) wanted to argue that we need more full-time jobs, he could have just said that. Almost every politician in recent memory has made that argument in one way or another. (Remember the old joke about how &amp;quot;Bill Clinton created three million jobs and I have four of them.&amp;quot;?) And surely you noticed that, by the end of his new explanation, Jeb (!) was back to arguing that the peons don&amp;#039;t work hard enough. Either that, or he&amp;#039;s more rhetorically maladroit than his big brother was, and that boggles the mind. (Here&amp;#039;s Ramesh Ponnuru buying the new bag of Jeb (!)&amp;#039;s magic beans.) At any rate, the only thing his campaign has going for it at the moment is money. Which, come to think of it, is why we have the Bush family in public life at all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a36400/jeb-agonistes/>