Jeb Bush: 'History will be kind to my brother'

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush says that the public will view his older brother, former president George W. Bush, more favorably as time passes. 

"In (my father's) four years as president a lot of amazing accomplishments took place," said Jeb Bush, the son of former President George H.W. Bush, during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press.  "So my guess is that history will be kind to my brother, the further out you get from this and the more people compare his tenure to what's going on now."

The 43rd president has largely stayed out of the spotlight since leaving office. After presiding over broad public discontent over the Iraq War and a flailing economy, George W. Bush left the White House with poor approval ratings and was notably unpopular even within his own party. 

Jeb Bush said he hasn't yet spoken to their famous parents about the idea of his own 2016 run. 

"I don't want to begin the process to think about it until it's the proper time to do so," he said. 

Jeb Bush was interviewed on NBC as a part of a media blitz to promote his new book, 'Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution." 

He has come under fire this week for failing to include a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants in his proposed immigration plan, a turnaround from his previous embrace of that proposal. 

He acknowledged Sunday that he could still back a plan that includes a path to citizenship but said that his book was intended to offer a reform plan that conservatives strongly opposed to "amnesty" could still support. 

"If they can find a way to get to a path to citizenship over the long haul, then I would support that," he said of ongoing bipartisan negotiators on the reform effort. "But this book was written to try to get people that were against reform to be for it.  And it is a place where I think a lot of conservatives should feel comfortable, that there's a way to do this and not violate their principles."

Asked whether or not he thinks he is more likely than his fellow immigration reform advocate and Floridian Republican Sen. Marco Rubio to end up in the Oval Office, Bush poked fun at "addicts" of political journalism. 

"You guys are crack addicts," he told host David Gregory. (He later jokingly corrected that characterization to "heroin addicts.")  "You really are obsessed with all this politics."