Testing Time
Jeb Bush’s educational experiment.
BY ALEC MACGILLIS
In December, Jeb Bush posted an update on his Facebook page which began by reporting that, over Thanksgiving, he and his family had “shared good food and watched a whole lot of football.” He added, “We also talked about the future of our nation. As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.”
The wording of the announcement was oddly diffident. It was widely known that Bush had been “actively exploring” the possibility of a campaign at least since the spring, when he started showing up at the gym in the grand Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, where he keeps his office, with a personal trainer and new workout gear. But there had been as yet no signs of a commitment. “It’s the telegraph people have been waiting for,” Jim Nicholson, a former Republican National Committee chairman and Cabinet secretary under President George W. Bush, said.
The announcement inevitably renewed questions about the desirability of political dynasties and about whether Jeb was being propelled to run, in part, by fraternal rivalry. “There’s always been a friendly competition among the siblings in the family, and that’s just human nature, I suppose,” George P. Bush, Jeb’s older son, told me. As Jeb, who was the governor of Florida for two terms, has followed his brother’s career, he has also stood apart from it. “There is kind of George W.’s world, and then there’s Jeb’s world, and frankly there’s not a lot of intersection,” Mark McKinnon, who was a senior adviser to George W.’s Presidential campaigns, said. Jeb is more introverted and more ideological than both his father, George H. W. Bush, whose politics are driven more by personal associations than by doctrine, and his brother, whose conservatism is more instinctual than considered. It was Jeb who signed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, and fought to keep Terri Schiavo on life support.
Now, though, as a result of the rightward shift in the Republican Party, Bush is being viewed as a moderate in the emerging Presidential field. He has strong support among the Party’s establishment and donor class, but his popularity among the current conservative rank and file is difficult to gauge. Since he left office, Bush has maintained a national profile through his work on the issue with which, as governor, he had sought to make his biggest mark: education reform. But, after leading the way in pushing a conservative vision for America’s schools, Bush is now caught in the midst of an unexpected upheaval on the issue within his own party.
His level of enthusiasm for running has also been difficult to assess. He has often cited worries about the effect that a campaign would have on his family, especially on his wife, Columba, who dislikes the role of political spouse. George P. Bush told me that it would be hard for his father to relinquish the life in business that he has led since leaving office, in 2007. “People forget that before he went into public service he was in real estate and has always had a business mind,” his son said.
The family that, over three generations, has served in the White House (twice), the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the governors’ mansions of two states is also a family of businessmen. Prescott Bush was a partner at the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, but, even as he thrived on Wall Street, with a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and three live-in maids, he declined to run for a vacant House seat in 1946, because he didn’t think he could afford it. He was finally elected to the Senate in 1952, at the age of fifty-seven. His son George H. W. Bush didn’t enter politics until he had become a millionaire in the Texas oil industry; he was elected to Congress in 1966, when he was forty-two. Doug Wead, who served as an adviser to both Presidents Bush, told me, “I don’t think it’s about money for money’s sake. It’s a way of defining who I am and where I sit in the history of the family: ‘Can I do it? Can I be a real man?’ Just imagine the pressure. The first step in life in the Bush family is: Can I make a million?”
After college, Jeb worked for the Texas Commerce Bank in Venezuela before returning to join his siblings—George; their younger brothers, Neil and Marvin; and their sister, Dorothy—on their father’s 1980 Presidential The Education of Jeb Bush - The New Yorker:
