After his father and his brother, Jeb Bush said his favorite president was James K. Polk (D), the Des Moines Register reports.

Said Bush: “One of the presidents that I really admire, and he’s not — I think people rank him pretty good, the historians who look at this — is James K. Polk… He said what he was going to do and he did what he said he was going to do, and then he left.”

“Although Bush didn’t mention it, Polk is perhaps best known for presiding over the Mexican-American War, in which U.S. forces battled all the way to Mexico City and won control of what is now New Mexico and California. The territorial expansion seen under Polk is now seen as fueling the fight over slavery of the mid-1800s. Polk himself was a slaveowner.”