Florida Gov. Jeb Bush says he won't run for president in 2008
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) -- Gov. Jeb Bush said Sunday he will not run for president in 2008 and defended his brother from critics who say the president refuses to acknowledge his mistakes.
The governor also denied a report that he knew of problems with a list of felons to be purged from the state's voter rolls months before it was discarded.
"I'm not going to run for president in 2008. That's not my interest," Bush told ABC's "This Week." "I'm going to finish my term."
Bush said he was not going to think about his next move until after completing his second term in 2006. In an Associated Press survey in August, more than a third of the state's Republican delegates said they favored Bush as the party's presidential candidate in 2008.
In the interview with George Stephanopolous, Bush defended President Bush against criticism from Democrats that his brother refuses to acknowledge mistakes with the economy and in Iraq.
"I think he could've admitted mistakes," he said. "We're all human. But, in this campaign season ... where every word is just jumped on, you know, people are cautious."
Also in the interview, the governor denied a report that he knew of problems with a list of felons to be purged from the state's list of eligible voters months before it was discarded. The list was thrown out in July because 2,500 ex-felons marked for purging the rolls had had their voting rights restored through the state's clemency process.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported Saturday that a state computer expert wrote in an May 4 e-mail that the Florida Department of State's top computer expert had told him that Bush had rejected a recommendation that the list be scrapped.
But Bush said the issue first came to his attention in July.
"I thought it was appropriate ... that it wasn't going to be a useful tool for supervisors to weed out people that shouldn't have the right to vote," he said.
Most of those wrongly purged were Democrats and many were black.
Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error when the two state databases were merged.
