Reno, Nevada: On Wednesday afternoon, just as she sat down to watch TV and eat a corn dog, Ivy Ziedrich's phone rang. It was her sister in Montana.
"I am so proud of you," her sister said, "for yelling at a politician."
It was the first inkling that Ziedrich, a 19-year-old college student with a passion for the debate team and the finer points of Middle Eastern policy, had gone viral.
Her confrontation with Jeb Bush a few hours earlier, in which she told the former Florida governor, "Your brother created ISIS (Daesh)," was suddenly everywhere online, highlighting an unflattering link between Bush and President George W. Bush's legacy in Iraq.
"My sister started freaking out," Ziedrich recalled.
In an interview, Ziedrich described a dizzying 24 hours of social media frenzy, her upbringing in a conservative Republican family and the circumstances that prompted her to approach Bush, who was in Reno for a town hall-style meeting Wednesday.
She had shown up with a few college friends uncertain of whether she wanted to ask anything at all. But as Bush spoke about the rise of the Deash (the so-called Islamic State for Iraq and the Syria, Isis) and put blame on President Barack Obama for removing troops from Iraq, Ziedrich found herself becoming furious. Daesh, she believed, was the product of George W. Bush's bungled war in Iraq.
"A Bush was trying to blame Isis (Daesh) on Obama's foreign policy - it was hilarious," said Ziedrich, who attends the University of Nevada. "It was like somebody crashing their car and blaming the passenger."
The college student who stumped Jeb Bush. Video with subtitles courtesy CNN
She acknowledged she was deeply nervous about walking up to him after the meeting and asking her question.
"I get nervous any time I talk to an authority figure - he wants to be president of the United States," she said.
Her question and his reply seemed to distill deep, lingering anger of the war in Iraq and encapsulate Bush's political challenges as the brother of the former president. Much online commentary focused on her somewhat aggressive tone, which Ziedrich found a bit baffling.
"I wasn't trying to be disrespectful," she said.
In fact, she said she was grateful that Bush responded, even if the response did not exactly satisfy her.
Ziedrich, a high school debater who specialized in the parliamentary style and still helps coach her former team, said all the attention she was garnering from those on the right (who thought she was rude) and those on the left (who wanted to canonize her) was confounding given her own political journey. Growing up in Northern California, she considered herself a conservative like her mother and father, who is a loyal Fox News viewer.
Then she identified as a libertarian and, ultimately, as Democratic, influenced by her time spent debating and by books like Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."
Speaking from her apartment, Ziedrich says she was busy juggling calls from old friends and media outlets.
"I am still trying to process all of this," she said.
So far, her mother has expressed approval of the confrontation. But she had not yet spoken with her father, a Bush family admirer.
"I am hoping he will be proud of me," she said.
Jeb Bush disagrees with brother on Iraq
Tempe, Arizona: After days of refusing to say whether, with the benefit of hindsight, he would have ordered an invasion of Iraq in 2003, Jeb Bush relented Thursday and said he would not have done so.
"If we're all supposed to answer hypothetical questions, knowing what we know now, what would you have done?" Bush said with a twinge of annoyance while campaigning in Arizona. "I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq."
It was an answer the former Florida governor and likely Republican candidate for president had refused to give in several public appearances this week, even as most of his GOP rivals did so and criticized him for sidestepping the question.
Bush said Thursday his resistance was caused both by loyalty to his older brother, George W. Bush, who ordered the invasion as president, and to the families of those lost in the decade-long war.
"I don't go out of my way to disagree with my brother," Bush told a group of reporters when asked why he was now willing to answer. "I am loyal to him."
That loyalty could cast a shadow over Bush's all-but-certain presidential bid, where his family name is both his strongest political asset and liability. He would become the third member of his family to serve as president should he follow his father and brother to the White House.
The Iraq war is among the most defining aspects of George W. Bush's presidency. More than 4,400 U.S. service personnel died, with many more severely wounded, in a war that cost at least $1.7 billion and was justified by faulty intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found.
Re-engage
The upcoming presidential contest will likely yield other moments when Bush is asked uncomfortable questions about his brother's time in office. Among them: the No Child Left Behind education law and the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina.
Bush said he had not spoken to his brother before talking about Iraq on Thursday, but said the U.S. needs "to re-engage (in Iraq), and do it in a more forceful way." Bush and other Republicans in the presidential mix often argue that President Barack Obama erred by so completely withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011.
Obama has sent a few thousand troops back into the country to help the Iraqi military fight Islamic State militants, and the next president is sure to face ongoing issues of stability there and elsewhere in the Middle East.
"We can't do this by remote control," Bush said.
As Bush struggled this week to address the issue, several Republican presidential prospects said definitively they would not have invaded Iraq based on information known today.
They include Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former technology executive Carly Fiorina and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
"The intelligence was clearly wrong. What we know now about the intelligence, no, I would not have authorized the war in Iraq," Fiorina said Wednesday night at the Republican National Committee's spring meeting in Phoenix. "We mismanaged going in and mismanaged going out."
A September 2014 AP-GfK poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they think history will judge the war as a failure. Among Republicans, that assessment was even more prevalent, with 76 percent saying the war would be seen a failure.
