Jeb Bush Gets Praise From Hillary Clinton’s Close Supporter: Marc Lasry Says He Will Make A Good President

Republican presidential probable Jeb Bush received an unexpected praise from the rival camp. Marc Lasry, core supporter and leading investor, who is the main fund raiser for Hillary Clinton’s U.S presidential campaign, has cheered Jeb Bush and said he would be a “reasonable” president.

Lasry said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “With All Due Respect” also added that “he would be a good president.” This must be a shot in the arm for Bush in charming the party primaries to become the official candidate of the party. In Lasry’s assessment, along with Bush, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Florida Senator Marco Rubio are the strongest contenders for Republican nomination.

Billionaire Supporter

Lasry, the billionaire co-founder of Avenue Capital Group, is known to be a close supporter of Hillary Clinton and closer to her family. Lasry also backed ex-President Bill Clinton and is the former employer of Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, when she was an analyst at Lasry’s New York-based firm. The investor also co-owns the National Basketball Association’s Milwaukee Bucks.

Lasry stated in April that he is targeting to raise $270,000 during the first week of Clinton’s campaign and claimed that many of the fundraisers at Manhattan are already oversold. According to him, despite Clinton’s politics moving to the left, a majority of donors “won’t have an issue with that.” He exudes the confidence that Democrats would be able to raise more than $1 billion.

Jeb Bush Paid Clinton

Meanwhile, reports suggest that Hillary Clinton’s speaking assignments had takers in companies owned by Jeb Bush also. This has been disclosed in the filings of Clinton’s personal financial returns, which showed she was paid $225,500 on March 24, 2014 by Academic Partnerships-- a for-profit education company where Bush had an ownership stake.

Clinton, in her speech at the invitation-only event in Dallas, hailed the company and said “today a student doesn’t need to travel to Cambridge, Mass, or Cambridge, England, to get a world-class education.” Academic Partnerships is into assisting universities for converting their academic degree programs into online versions so that students can take it from anywhere in the world.

Chasing Money

Meanwhile, Washington Post in a report expressed displeasure at the dominance of money in the campaign and regretted the trend of relegating real clear issues to the sidelines. It said the 2016 presidential campaign looks like a shapeless enterprise barring the prominence of money in its narrative.

Noting that money has become the defining characteristic of the race, it highlighted the political and private activities of the brands Clinton and Bush. Striking a critical note, it said both Clinton and Jeb Bush brought unintentional attention to the role of money in politics as if it is an inevitable intersection of public influence with a glaring absence of restraints, self-imposed or enforced evident in it.

(For feedback/comments, contact the writer at k.kumar@ibtimes.com.au)