DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Jeb Bush heads to Europe next week to put a checkmark in a final box before making his campaign for president official: an overseas visit to catch up with a few of America’s friends.
All of his hosts, Germany, Poland and Estonia are stalwart U.S. allies, and they’re calmer destinations than the cauldron of the Middle East. But the last name Bush still stirs anger in parts of Europe – a legacy of former President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
For this Bush, the trick with his first trip overseas as a White House hopeful is to avoid spending too much time making the same case to European leaders he’s had to make at home to American voters – that he’s not his brother.
“If he tries to make this trip about see-how-I’m-not-like-George W. Bush, if that’s the story line of the trip, it will not have been a success,” said Peter Feaver, former head of strategic operations at the National Security Agency and now a professor at Duke University.
The trip comes at a key time for Bush. He will return a day before kicking off his campaign with an event in Miami, fresh from a journey he hopes will show he’s ready to step onto the world stage.