Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton come from the highest political pedigree in the United States. And despite the battles their two families have fought against each other, members of the Clintons and the Bushes have formed inextricable bonds.
But politics is politics, and when the two presidential candidates address the same audience on Friday, they’ll likely bring different messages that underscore their clashing presidential platforms.
In a rare scene, Clinton and Bush are among the guests scheduled to speak at the National Urban League conference in Miami, where a select group of Republican and Democratic candidates will make their pitch for president before a predominately African-American crowd.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a Republican, along with Democratic candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, will also speak.
But all eyes will be on Clinton and Bush, both of whom are running at or near the top of their fields for their respective party’s nomination. It’s the first time they’ll speak at the same event since announcing their White House bids.
The conference comes after a year of growing racial tension that has exploded into an emotional debate over the separate killings of black Americans at the hands of white police officers. That conflict has seen fresh attention after the death of a black woman, Sandra Bland, in a Texas jail after a traffic violation. Officials ruled the death a suicide.
Also in recent memory: The massacre of nine parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white male who told authorities he wanted to “shoot black people.” The tragedy sparked a passionate, bipartisan effort to have the Confederate Flag removed from state capitol grounds in Columbia, South Carolina.
Encapsulating their message in the slogan “black lives matter,” activists have sought to bring racial injustice to the forefront of the presidential debate, forcing politicians from both parties to face questions about how they would remedy racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
It’s been a difficult issue to navigate for many of the candidates. Confronted by activists in June, O’Malley responded: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” He later apologized, saying he did not “mean to be insensitive” to the “depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”
Bush, however, defended O’Malley, arguing that the Democratic candidate shouldn’t have to apologize for saying “all lives matter.”
“I know in the political context it’s a slogan, and should he have apologized? No. If he believes that white lives matter, which I hope he does, then he shouldn’t apologize to a group that seemed to disagree with it,” he said in New Hampshire last week.
Clinton had her own “black lives matter” misstep when she told an audience just miles from Ferguson, Missouri – where the shooting of Michael Brown sparked sustained protests — that “all lives matter.”
Since then, and with the benefit of watching her opponents stumble, Clinton has used the phrase “black lives matter” repeatedly.
“This is not just a slogan,” Clinton said of the phrase during a campaign stop in South Carolina. “This should be a guiding principle.”
Clinton — and her campaign aides who see the pathway to electoral victory through the Obama coalition — have made reaching out to African American voters an integral part of the campaign.
Her first speech as a candidate was on police reform, where she called for mandatory police body cameras across the nation. And after the Charleston shooting, Clinton said that the United States’ struggle with racism is “far from finished.”
“I know this is a difficult topic to talk about,” Clinton said earlier this year in San Francisco. “I know that so many of us hoped by electing our first black President we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. I know there are truths we don’t like to say out loud in discussions with our children, but we have to. That is the only way we can possibly move forward together.”
Clinton’s team has also engaged the activists behind Black Lives Matter. After the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old boy who was shot by police in Cleveland, LaDavia Drane, Clinton’s African-American outreach director, had one-on-one meetings and group listening sessions with individuals involved in the Cleveland for the Movement for Black Lives.
While Bush hasn’t waded as far into the debate, he was asked earlier this week by a reporter why there’ve been so many questions or examples lately of police brutality. Shaking his head, he said he didn’t know.
“Maybe this has been going on a long while, but now because we capture everything in the digital world, perhaps that’s the reason that there’s been a larger number of these things,” he said.
Bush added there “ought to be some consideration of … expanding cameras (and) certainly more training,” but he also argued there needs “to be a recognition that being a police officer is a dangerous job. And they get it right a lot of times, too.”
More broadly on racial inequality, Bush has pledged to campaign in urban areas and push a message that Republicans have the right policies to bring people out of poverty.
Following Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential loss — in which he carried only 6% of the black vote — Republicans have stepped up their efforts to court minority voters. Bush is among a small slew of 2016 candidates who have portrayed themselves as White House hopefuls able to woo nontraditional Republican voters.
According to excerpts from his prepared remarks, Bush will recall moving the Confederate Flag from the Florida capitol state grounds to a museum as governor and increasing the number of African-Americans who work in the governor’s administration. He’ll argue that the decades-long war on poverty has been a “losing one”
A fluent Spanish speaker, Bush’s outreach efforts have been primarily focused on Hispanics, but he featured a young African-American woman in his announcement video last month who benefited from a school choice initiative that he started as governor.
And in his speech, he’ll likely point to his record of creating the first charter school in Florida with T. Willard Fair, the president of the Urban League of Greater Miami. In a glowing opinion piece in the Sun Sentinel on Thursday, Fair said Bush has been his “greatest partner” in doing “whatever was necessary to advance the progression of Black America towards Equal Opportunity.”
“I believe in the right to rise in this country,” Bush will say, according to excerpts. “And a child is not rising if he’s not reading.”
Such outreach efforts, however, have left some minority voters of both parties feeling taken for granted in the past. At an event with racially diverse pastors in Orlando on Monday, a black man asked Bush how he plans to serve minority communities in non-election years.
“Look, you can’t be everywhere every place,” Bush said. “But you need to show a commitment day in and day out.”
The last time Bush and Clinton shared the same stage was at The Globalization of Higher Education conference in Irving, Texas in March 2014. Before that, Clinton and Bush shared a stage was at the 2013 gala for the National Constitution Center, whose board Bush chaired. Bush bestowed the group’s Liberty Medal to Clinton, stating that she received it because she had “dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy.”