The Education of Jeb Bush

Bush disappears into a building, and when he emerges a couple hours later, after the meetings and the talk, a young aide points him to a waiting minivan, and they’re still there, still politely beseeching. 

“Man, those guys just don’t quit, do they?” Bush says in the car. He gives them a theatrical shrug through the car window. “I don’t have the time, man,” he says, pointing at his watch. “Gotta go.”

“Just one!” yells their leader, a large teen squeezed sausage-like into a Kansas City Royals hoodie. “Governor!”

One of his aides explains that the trio stalk celebrities for autographs, which they then try to sell wherever they can. Bush laughs: “Good luck with that.”

A few minutes later the minivan rolls to a stop at another section of the vast fairgrounds, where a camera crew is set up under a picturesque stand of trees. As he travels around the country Bush communicates with his followers often by video. He rarely talks to the press at length, and here in the early days of his unofficial campaign for the presidency, his time is taken up by meetings with funders and donors—high net worth individuals, as rich people sometimes call themselves—and occasional set pieces, like his talk to the agribusinessmen at the fairgrounds. In his mini-videos he tells his supporters where he’s been and what he’s just done there, and where he’s headed and what he’s about to do there. He doesn’t mention the fundraisers, of course.

Against the backdrop of the trees Bush stands before the camera and improvises a few lines. He’s conspicuously tall, over 6’3″, maybe 6’4″, depending on who you talk to, and like a lot of unusually tall people he bears the marks of a lifetime spent trying to look inconspicuous in the company of people much shorter than he is. The stoop and the rounded shoulders look by now irreversible. At 62, he still moves at the unhurried pace of an accomplished athlete—he was a walk-on varsity tennis player in college—and despite many months of a vigorous exercise program and a cruel dietary regime, he retains the well-fed look of his younger years. 

“Aw, you gotta be kidding me,” he says. The trio have followed him in a car. They’re standing next to it, waiting—politely—to be called over, each holding a large color photo of Bush from his days as governor of Florida. An aide tells Bush his entourage is running late. Bush waves them over anyway, and they scamper to his side, but only after ducking back into their car and withdrawing another collection of photos to be signed.

If you ask Jeb Bush if there’s an aspect of his life that people might be surprised to learn about, he usually says, “I’m an introvert.” It’s an odd frailty for a professional politician, and Bush says it took him years of effort to overcome his inborn shyness.

“I learned that in order to make your case, or in order to serve or in order to advance a cause, you have to connect with people,” he said earlier this year. “You have to engage with people, look ’em in the eye, connect with them on a human level, understand where they’re coming from.” 

His efforts to connect with the autograph hunters don’t seem to work terribly well—not for lack of trying on his part. 

“You guys registered to vote?” Bush asks, and the three guys stare blankly at each other. Vote? 

“Gonna show up for the caucuses in January?” Caucuses?

“Here,” their leader says. From beneath his hoodie he’s produced a book that Bush cowrote. Bush signs. “And here”—another picture, even bigger this time, of Governor Bush resplendent against an American flag. Bush signs it and turns to leave. “Wait, one more, please,” the hoodie says. A baseball appears.

“You want me to sign .  .  . a baseball?”

The hoodie nods excitedly.

“Here’s the deal,” Bush says, holding the ball. “I sign this, you guys register to vote, okay? And you show up at the caucuses. A signature for a vote. Is that a deal?”

Walking back to the minivan, he shakes his head, still puzzled. “I mean,” he says, “how much do they think they can get for something like that on eBay?”

The autograph of a guy who was a governor nearly 10 years ago? Probably not much. Of a guy who might be presi-dent 20 months from now? A lot more, probably.

Judging by the giddiness that overcomes the trio as they scuttle back to their car with their booty, they’re banking on a president. 

And of course they’re not alone. 

Among themselves, Bush loyalists—a far-flung and, as these things go, not-terribly-numerous scattering of money men, campaign consultants, officeholders, former officeholders, admirers, party hacks, hangers-on, publicists, and mainchancers who have always found themselves a tick or two behind the curve—these loyalists are pretty sure Jeb Bush is a future president. Many of them have even taken to calling him “45.” They called his father “41,” you see, because he was the forty-first president of the United States. Jeb’s brother was “43.” Since 1989, the Bushes have held a monopoly on odd-numbered presidencies. It’s time again, the Bushies reason.

You can be forgiven if you believe this pre-hatch counting of the chickens is cause enough to keep Jeb Bush out of the White House, if only to destroy the dearly held fantasy of political courtiers who have already contributed to two failed presidencies and now pine to work their magic in a third. Other Republicans have more substantial reasons to oppose him, or think they do, especially among the self-consciously conservative activists of the party. Bush’s enthusiasm for the Common Core educational standards and his advocacy of leniency for illegal immigrants apparently mark him as a “moderate,” a designation the political press has happily taken up. 

At the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, in suburban Washington, D.C., the mention of Bush’s name produced a round of boos louder even than the catcalls that rained down after a mention of Hillary Clinton. (His reception brightened considerably when he appeared in person.) The radio talk show host Laura Ingraham had the ingenuity to combine the two conservative pariahs into a single candidate she called Clush: “We could dispense with this whole nomination process altogether—why don’t we call it quits and Jeb and Hillary can run on the same ticket?”

To understand the strangeness of the position that Jeb Bush finds himself in, it helps to look at his record as a practicing politician—a governor. When he left office in 2007, the verdict on his tenure was unanimous among Republicans, “moderates” and right-wingers alike. Writing in this magazine at the time, Fred Barnes summed it up: After two terms in office, Bush was not only the best governor in America but also the most conservative. Moreover, Republicans assumed that he was the former because he was the latter: His success was directly attributable to his ideology. That he should now be condemned as a moderate is a new and unexpected lesson in the education of Jeb Bush.

He was 8 when he announced to his family that he would be president some day, according to The Bushes, an exhaustive (and very friendly) biography of the clan by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. Meanwhile his brother George, seven years his senior, was still entertaining hopes of being a baseball player. Galaxies of pixels have been discharged analyzing the relationship between the two brothers, to little effect. The Bushes themselves aren’t much help with psychological vivisection. Asked once by a Newsweek reporter “what it means” to be a member of the famous Bush family, Jeb responded: “It means that we don’t talk about what it means.” Undertaken by political reporters, the probing seems especially inept. “You have the political press writing about non-political issues,” he said. “Most of these people are not the most brilliant people in the world, and when you get them out of their area, writing about the family, it can be a little bit scary.”

The most that can safely be said about the relationship between the two oldest Bush boys—there are two others, Marvin and Neil, along with their sister Dorothy—is that Jeb and George are not particularly close and never have been. They haven’t lived under the same roof since George W. left for prep school, when Jeb was seven. There’s a difference in temperament, too. Family friends are familiar with images like the one recalled by Ron Kaufman, a longtime aide and confidant to the first President Bush. Both Jeb and George W., already governors, were nominated to the Alfalfa Club, an exclusive gathering of nearly every high-ranking politician and powerbroker in the nation’s capital. (It’s the sort of place where, if you really want to, you can see Robert Gates hug Barbara Mikulski.) W. approached the induction party for the new members with relish, charging into the small crowd, squeezing shoulders, slapping backs, barking wisecracks. “He was in his element, having a great time,” Kaufman says. “And then over to the side, there’s Jeb. He was polite. But you could see it in his eyes: This was a man who really wanted to be back at his computer in Tallahassee, working on the state budget.”

Jeb followed his older brother to prep school, at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was, he said later, a place full of “Massachusetts people thinking their way was the only right way,” a reminder that even scions of famous, well-to-do families aren’t immune to class resentment. This being the late 1960s, Jeb grew bangs, smoked pot, and dabbled in the socialists’ club. He hated it. “I was a cynical little turd in a cynical school,” he later told the writer Joel Achenbach. The fall of his senior year he enrolled in a study-abroad course with the baggy title “Man and Society,” which took him to Mexico for several weeks. There he met the sister of a classmate’s girlfriend, a 17-year-old named Columba Gallo, known as Colu, and .  .  . “Boom! I was gone,” he said later. “She was the first girl I ever loved, and the last.” 

Tradition suggested that the next stop on a Bush’s itinerary was Yale, alma mater to four generations of Jeb’s family. Instead he returned to Texas, where he had spent most of his boyhood, and enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in two and a half years, with a degree in Latin American Studies. He was admitted to UT law school but says he was too eager to get on with life to spend three years studying torts. He and Colu, by then 21 and 20, were married in the campus chapel, and their first child, George Prescott Bush, arrived two years later (followed in the next few years by a sister, Noelle, and a brother, Jeb).

In his 1986 profile, Joel Achenbach described the care Jeb took to rear his children in the self-sufficient -folkways of the family. George P., aged 10, had gone to the Army-Navy football game and been invited to do the coin toss on the 50-yard line, accompanied by his grandfather, better known as the vice president. On his return home Jeb took the boy aside. “I have to tell him that he’s a normal kid—that he’s not special because of who he is, that he’s going to have to earn his own way. That’s how we grew up, and that’s how I want my kids to grow up.”

This might be a heavy lesson for a 10-year-old, but it is true to the Bush family mythology. George H. W. Bush lit out from Connecticut to make a living as a wildcatter in the 1950s, just as his father had quit his grandfather’s family business in the Midwest to go East; Jeb followed by leaving Texas for Florida in the 1980s to build his family and fortune. Yet the Bushes themselves readily admit that it is much easier to strike out on your own when your father is a senator and investment banker, as in H. W.’s case, or the vice president and then president of the United States, as Jeb’s father was. Infusions of Eastern capital kept H. W.’s oil company afloat, and Jeb was able to call on the family network from the earliest days of his work life. His first job out of UT was as an officer, and soon vice president, of a bank founded by the grandfather of James Baker, H. W.’s closest friend. It’s good to be a Bush.

The bank job took him and his family to Venezuela for two years, and he used the opportunity to perfect his command of Spanish. Jeb’s family still speak Spanish at home; his children’s first spoken words were in Spanish. Wiseguys have often noted that Jeb speaks Spanish more fluently than some Bushes speak English. After his decades in Florida his accent has Cuban inflections, and even in his native tongue he displays what might be called NPR Spanish: He uses unaccented English until a Spanish word drifts into view and then he goes native. I’m going home to whip up some of my gwahk-ah-mo-lay with a lot of the see-lahn-trrro .  .  .

As it happened, Bush didn’t much like bank work: “I wasn’t real good at collecting [bad] loans,” of which, in Venezuela, there were lots. He quit to work full-time for his father’s presidential campaign in 1979 and ’80, the only Bush child to do so. He ran the primary organization in Florida, with headquarters in Little Havana in Miami, and found the state much as his father had found Texas a generation earlier: virgin territory untouched by Bushes. 

He settled his family in Miami and, as the vice president’s son, partook modestly of the fame that can still inflame Iowa autograph hunters; Achenbach records a lunch in the late ’80s in which Bush was interrupted by waitresses and busboys asking for immigration help. He took a job with a real estate firm owned by a supporter of his father, hustling rental contracts for corporate clients and scouting investment opportunities. Before the decade was out he was making more than a million dollars a year. By the time he ran for governor, in 1994, he was a wealthy man. By all accounts Bush made his money because he was smart, tireless, creative, unflappable, personable, and a Bush. 

He ventured into politics before too long, winning the chairmanship of the Dade County Republican party in 1984, campaigning for local candidates and collecting chits. Two years later the state’s Republican governor appointed him the state secretary of commerce. The appointment gave Bush his first experience of the cognitive dissonance that many small-government ideologues encounter: He took a job that he thought shouldn’t exist, running a department that he wanted to privatize as a matter of principle. He left in frustration after 18 months to run the Florida branch of his father’s 1988 presidential campaign.  

But it’s the ’94 campaign for Florida governor that works as the hinge in Jeb Bush’s political life, a shift whose effects are felt even now, as he introduces himself to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Already in 1994 he had the reputation of a committed conservative with a libertarian severity: a board member of the Heritage Foundation and reader of intellectual journals like Policy Review and the American Spectator, an aspiring egghead eager to master the minutiae of government policy in hopes of undoing or reversing the ill effects of government policy. Far more ideological than either his brother or his father, he was, said the political consultant Mike Murphy, “the Bush brother with balls.” 

“All of us on the campaign, he called us gladiators or head-bangers,” says Tom Feeney, Bush’s running mate in ’94—also the Christian Coalition’s Legislator of the Year, dubbed the “David Duke of Florida” by Democrats. Bush vowed to send federal welfare dollars back to Washington and pledged to eliminate not only the state department of commerce but also the department of education—indeed, not just to eliminate them, but “blow them up.” 

You never knew when those conservative cojones would swing into view. At a public forum he was asked what he “was prepared to do” for black Floridians by a questioner evidently expecting a bundle of special programs swaddled in gauzy rhetoric. His terse answer, “probably nothing,” became instantly infamous, though from a conservative point of view, which in theory disavows the parsing of the population by race, it was easily defensible. (Asked not long ago about his greatest regret in politics, Bush mentioned his “probably nothing” answer.)

Less famously he said women on welfare “should be able to get their life together and find a husband,” though he complained that his comments were taken out of context. He wrote an op-ed about gay rights, arguing that sodomy should not be raised to a legal category, the same as race or religion. One salvo apparently backfired: In the final days of a close campaign, he accused the incumbent governor, Lawton Chiles, of stalling the execution of a convicted child murderer to appease left-wing voters—an accusation that was itself a transparent appeal to right-wing voters. Pundits expected Bush to win, but he came up short by 64,000 votes. On the same day, his older brother won an upset victory over a sitting governor in Texas. 

“That was a big year for Republicans, you’ll remember,” Bush says from the front seat as the minivan pulls out of the fairgrounds. We have at last shaken the autograph hounds. “I think two Republicans lost—Mitt Romney to Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts and me to Lawton Chiles.” 

Bush’s friends from those days say the unexpected loss was painful and disheartening, and probably the cause for as much soul-searching as a Bush can admit to. He said publicly that the campaign’s constant travel and absences from home had taken a toll on his family life. He founded a think tank, the Foundation for Florida’s Future, to serve as a political base for another run for governor and also as a warehouse for policy proposals from the conservative movement nationwide. With the director of the Miami Urban League he raised money to found a charter school in the African-American suburb of Liberty City, and once it was established he spent several hours a week there, beyond the range of reporters and cameramen. He converted to Catholicism and to this day carries a rosary in his coat pocket. And he decided to change his whole approach to politics.

“The big lesson of ’94,” he calls it. 

“I was all about ideas,” he says now. “And we had a whole slew of white papers—some very cool ideas, I might add. But people aren’t going to listen to just ideas.” 

When Chiles attacked him as a heartless ideologue, he says, voters had no real evidence to think otherwise. “The thing I didn’t do was show my heart. I didn’t show who I was,” he says. “In politics you put a human context around things, and you show your heart. The ideology that I believe, the belief in limited government, that didn’t change. But I learned a lot. And the tone of my language is reflected in what I learned.”

To prepare himself for another run for governor, he gave himself a crash course in the intersection of state government and ordinary citizens. “What I did was, I wandered,” he says. “Basically that’s what I did. I quit my job and just went around. I raised money [for a second gubernatorial campaign]. I raised a ton of money, but that was at night.”

Daytime he visited courtrooms unannounced. “I sat and watched judges that were supervising the child welfare system. I’d spend three hours at a time watching them go through case after case—abandoned children, neglected kids, abused kids. The system was so screwed up.

“I visited 250 schools.” He pauses to let the number sink in. “You don’t think that’s a lot of schools, try it sometime. That’s like a three-schools-a-day kinda deal. Sometimes I’d just walk in unannounced. I’d say, I’m running for governor and I just want to learn from what you’re doing.”

At one luncheon meeting he was confronted by a woman who said the special education system had failed her disabled daughter. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she told him.

“Okay,” Bush replied, according to contemporary accounts. “You’ve got four days. Teach me what it’s like.” 

Over the next week, he says, “she showed me programs that work and programs that don’t. We went to group homes, independent living places.” After his election as governor, the mother, Berthy De La Rosa-Aponte, became an adviser to the governor’s root-and-branch overhaul of the special education system. She’s now a well-known authority in state and federal disability programs. And a Republican.

“He became a better politician,” says Mac Stipanovich, who managed his first unsuccessful campaign. “He learned how to talk to people about things they care about.” Stipanovich contrasts the ’94 version of candidate Jeb with his brother W., a far more natural politician. 

“You’d ask George W. Bush, ‘What’s your position on crime?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m against it.’ And you’d say, uh, could you be more specific? And he’d say, ‘Okay. I’m really against it.’ You’d ask Jeb about crime and he would talk your ear off for an hour about sentencing guidelines, incarceration rates, everything.

“He believed 10 things very firmly in ’94. In ’98 he still believed in the same 10 things, but he learned that if a particular group only agrees with you on 5, only talk about the 5.”

The softened and simplified rhetoric—this language of the heart, as Bush says—proved maddening for his opponent, Chiles’s lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay. As his running mate Bush chose the state commissioner of education, the head of a department he said four years earlier he wanted to blow up. At a candidates’ debate at an inner-city church two weeks before Election Day, MacKay became so vexed at Bush’s reasonableness that he cried out: “If he wants to be a Democrat, then let’s have the conversion right here in church!”

In fact, his platform, still festooned with white papers, changed scarcely at all between ’94 and ’98. When Bush won handily, he could rightly claim a mandate for an ambitious agenda: tort reform, tax cuts, limits on abortion, school choice, and much else. Feeney, his first-time running mate, says: “He’d realized that if you’re going to grow the party you’re going to have to bring non-hardcore nonpartisans along with you, on reforms they might not be comfortable with otherwise. It wasn’t just winning an election. It was laying the groundwork for massive conservative reform.”

The astonishing achievements of Bush’s eight years in office will soon, he hopes, be familiar to primary voters. Even Republican non-Floridians might have missed them if they weren’t paying attention. 

“Jeb Bush is as conservative as any governor in America, and much more so than most,” wrote the journalist Tucker Carlson in 1999. “But you’d never know it unless you listened carefully, or took a close look at the bills he supports. If Bush’s legislation is radical, his tone is all accommodation and empathy.”

The Bush record in Florida is like a wish list conjured from right-wing daydreams. With Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature, “Bush made Florida into a laboratory of conservative governance,” writes Matthew T. Corrigan in Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida, destined for now to be the definitive account of Bush’s eight years in Tallahassee. 

Corrigan is a political science professor at the University of North Florida and shows every indication of having the political leanings common to his trade. He records with mounting horror the list of Bush’s successes. While Florida’s population grew by two million, the state government’s workforce declined by 13,000—the result of sweeping privatization of everything from state park maintenance to personnel management. At least one kind of state tax or another was cut every year he was in office, for a total of $19 billion. He left office with a $3 billion surplus in the state treasury. For the first time in history the state earned a AAA bond rating.

It helped that in his first two years his state, like many others in the blissful ’90s, was awash in cash, pouring in from the economic boom and from billion-dollar settlements with tobacco companies. An Associated Press headline from 1999 summarized the lucky position he found himself in: “Bush budget has it all: spending increases, tax cuts.” Spending increases were of a particular kind: More money was poured into care for seniors, for instance, but only to fund vouchers and other mechanisms that transferred control of their care from state institutions to family members or the seniors themselves. Otherwise the fiscal discipline continued through flush times and bad, often against the opposition of some powerful Republican legislators, who saw no reason why new revenue had to be returned to the taxpayers. One bitter Republican leader called Bush and his staff “Shiite Republicans.”

The epithet was directed as well at Bush’s nonfiscal agenda. After a mad rush in the first year, he and the legislature ran out of ways to liberalize gun laws; the Stand Your Ground law implicated in the Trayvon Martin shooting was a Bush-era innovation. Under Bush, Florida even exempted gun shops from state rules regulating chemical runoff into the water table, a legislative two-fer beyond the imagination of the most fevered deregulating gun nut. 

Bush’s attempts to limit abortion were unprecedented in Florida and most other states too. Many of the laws were overturned by hostile state judges, but even so, only a few years into the Bush era, the Florida legislature had banned partial-birth abortion, imposed parental notification requirements on minors seeking abortions, subsidized antiabortion pregnancy centers, funded pro-life billboards along state highways, and even offered a “Choose Life” license plate. Bush’s rhetoric in pursuing his social agenda was typically rounded. He framed parental notification, for instance, not as a means to reduce abortions but an opportunity for parents “to love and console.” His stubborn fight for the right to life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman whose husband obtained a court order to hasten her death by denying her food and water, drew international attention, much of it horrified.

“I just think it’s humorous,” Tom Feeney says now, when reminded that lots of reporters and Republicans are calling Bush a moderate. “It’s pure revisionism for anyone to ignore the fact that he was the most conservative governor in the country.”

When he left office, in 2007, Bush’s approval rating in some polls stood above 60 percent, having rarely fallen below 50 percent in the preceding eight years. Even veteran Bush watchers like Peter Brown, a former writer for the Orlando Sentinel and now assistant director of polls for Quinnipiac University, express surprise.

“After eight years, with that record?” Brown says. “But people liked him. They knew he was a conservative guy and he acted on what he believed, but he was like Reagan: He wasn’t a hater. People liked it that he didn’t pick on people.”

Florida Democrats understood what Bush was doing then better than national Republicans understand it now. As early as 1998, a writer for the New Republic warned: “Democrats everywhere should be wary of what Jeb Bush is creating here in Florida.” The last testament of their Bush nightmare is an unintentionally funny book, published in 2007, called Jeb: America’s Next Bush, by S.V. Dáte, former Tallahassee bureau chief for the Palm Beach Post. The intensity of the animus reveals a partisan who has run out of ideas and come slightly unhinged: Readers of conservative books from the Clinton years will recognize the crudity. When the outrage runs thin only sarcasm is left.

Like his fellow Florida Democrats, Dáte grabs whatever is at hand and slaps it all together for a soppy mudball: Sometimes Bush is too honest, sometimes too deceptive; he’s a religious nut who fakes his piety; an unwavering capitalist who regularly betrays his capitalist beliefs; an introvert who hypocritically acts like an extrovert; a man blinded and bound by ideology and a cynic who believes next to nothing. Whatever. In the end there’s a final shrug, the big concession: “Maybe the guy really does believe the nonsense he’s saying,” Dáte writes. 

Dáte’s old book has taken on renewed relevance nowadays as it is passed around the national political press corps. Dáte has become the go-to Jeb Bush interpreter and analyst for the influential Washington tip-sheet Politico, and he sits as editor of the Washington desk at National Public Radio. Both outlets, of course, take care to remain scrupulously nonpartisan. (Sarcasm.)

How did Bush drive opponents like S.V. Dáte mad? The comprehensiveness of his agenda may have been enough to do the job all by itself. Yet what Bush did as governor might tell us less about him as a presidential candidate than how he did it. He achieved conservative ends with as little fuss and confrontation as possible by deploying a rare political dexterity. 

Often it took a while for his opponents to know what hit them. Two cases are exemplary, involving issues that were, in the 1990s, the beating heart of the right’s national program: school choice and racial preferences, pro- the first, con- the second.

In 1999, Ward Connerly came to Tallahassee. He was a conservative celebrity at the time, as the prime mover of a ballot initiative banning racial preferences in California. The initiative passed overwhelmingly. It has since plausibly been deemed one cause of the California Republican party’s rapid demise in that state, driving black and Latino voters even deeper into the arms of the Democrats. Connerly traveled the country hoping to inspire similar initiatives in other states, presenting Bush with a pickle.

On one hand, conservatives, and Republicans generally, saw the enshrining of racial categories in law as constitutionally disastrous. Bush himself claimed to see it that way. On the other hand .  .  .

“We saw what had happened in California,” Mac Stipanovich says. “That initiative had riven the state. Jeb Bush cut that off at the root.”

Republican state legislators refused to see Connerly. Bush invited him in for a long conversation. In a press conference after the meeting he made it clear that he would oppose a ballot initiative like the one in California. Connerly, Bush said, “wanted a war. I’m a lover.”

Conservatives, including editorialists at this magazine, were appalled. Connerly was offended, and Bush returned to work. 

Within weeks the lover issued an executive order he called “One Florida.” It explicitly dismantled racial preferences in state government hiring and contracting, and in admissions to state universities—precisely the end that Connerly had sought and that Bush had said he supported. Bush managed to avoid the kind of debate that thrilled activists and distracted everyone else by conceding that racial preferences were once useful as recompense for Jim Crow. Now, however, at the end of the twentieth century, preferences were an unnecessary source of animosity and ill will, separating citizen from citizen. 

To replace preferences at state schools, Bush ordered that the top 20 percent of graduates of every high school in the state be admitted to at least one state university. As for contracting, Bush says now, “I looked at it as a business strategy. 

“To give you an example, we had 20 people working in the bureau that certified whether a black-owned business was really owned by blacks, or a woman-owned business was owned by a woman. Well, if you get rid of preferences and set-asides and preferential pricing, they don’t have much to do.” 

So they were fired. And then rehired. Their bureau became a recruiting and marketing resource for companies applying for state business. The progress was carefully measured, he says. “And we had an explosion in contracts for minority businesses.” Even now the state has a higher percentage of minority contractors than before Bush issued his order.

“We had a great rollout for One Florida,” Bush says. “In a way, we managed to defer the controversy.” But controversy was inevitable. Several weeks after Bush’s executive order, two black legislators staged a sit-in at the governor’s office, which in turn launched a demonstration of at least 10,000 protesters demanding the return of preferences in college admissions. 

In contrast to California, however, the political effect was vastly smaller than the practical effect. Bush agreed to slow the implementation of the order but declined to change its provisions. As Corrigan, the political scientist, notes in his book, diversity in higher ed enrollment, measured by percentage, was higher at the end of Bush’s time in office than before. (The percentage of African-American students has declined slightly.) All while cleansing the state laws of invidious racial classifications. 

“Education policy,” says Corrigan, “has been the core of Bush’s public life.” Under Bush the state’s gains in educational performance were dramatic and, by his own account, the proudest achievement of his tenure. “Bush’s governorship fostered the largest experiment in public school education in the nation’s history,” Corrigan writes. And at the core of Bush’s education policy was choice: letting parents choose which school to send their children to, from as wide a variety of schools as possible, including private and religious schools. “Education is a matter of local control,” says Bush’s closest aide on education policy, Patricia Levesque. “He thought choice is the ultimate local control, because it pushes educational decisions all the way down into the hands of parents. He called choice the catalytic converter of reform.”

In the ’90s “vouchers” was the term for parental school choice—“and the word was pretty toxic,” Bush says now. So he called the vouchers “opportunity scholarships.” The idea, however, was still toxic, rousing the hostility of teachers’ unions, associations of school administrators, even the ACLU, which complained that state money might find its way into the hands of religious educators. 

Under Bush’s program, “opportunity scholarships” would be given directly to parents whose children were enrolled in a failing public school. When Bush muscled through his program, a dizzying array of lawsuits were filed to stop it. And lower courts often agreed, putting the program in perpetual limbo. The opponents’ main argument was that choice violated the Blaine provision of the Florida constitution, which said that funds from the state treasury could not go to sectarian institutions.

Bush and his administration kept the voucher program going as long as they legally could. The case took years to wind through the courts. In the meantime, Bush reasoned, the easiest way around the Blaine provision was to use funds that had never gone into the state treasury in the first place. Thus was born the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship. Every dollar a business donated to a state-sponsored scholarship fund would be deducted from its tax bill. Money went straight to the fund, bypassing the treasury altogether. 

“Our intention was to build that up as fast as possible,” Bush says. “We wanted to be able to provide relief if ultimately the courts ruled against us. So we slow-danced the appeals process, if that’s the term. We took our time filing the appeals.”

The slow dance lasted all the way to Bush’s last year in office, when the state supreme court definitively ruled against state funding of vouchers for private schools. But private school choice continued in Florida, thanks to the tax credits. Today it’s the largest voucher program in the country. And it has spawned a series of other voucher programs, including “MacKay scholarships” for the parents of children with learning disabilities. Before Bush’s governorship such parents were condemned to warehouse-style state schools for the mentally disabled. Now they can take the money and walk. 

Back in the minivan, Bush explains all this with overpowering enthusiasm. He twists in the front seat to face the passengers in the rear.

“I used this phrase I read about in Harvard Business Review: bee-hags. Big Hairy Audacious Goals. I wanted to be goal-driven; it became clear to me that the best thing about reforming something and fixing things and making it better was that it gave you an opportunity to fix the next thing.” He made a rolling motion with his hands. “It’s perpetual. Reform is never final, success is never complete. You can never stop playing offense. So opportunity scholarships begat corporate tax scholarships, which begat the MacKay scholarships, which begat our virtual school initiative, which begets education savings accounts .  .  .

“The minute you stop reforming, atrophy can set in, and that’s when you can have setbacks. You’ve got to be pushing the ball forward.” 

When Bush settles back in his seat, there’s an objection from a kibitzer in the back: What does all this have to do with the federal government? These are all state responsibilities. After all, presidents can’t do what governors do .  .  .

He wheels around again. 

“Why not?” 

Well .  .  .

“I mean, why not? I’ve never understood that. Why can’t presidents reform things? It seems to me there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit there: procurement policies, career civil service reform, job training programs, our public assistance programs—they’re all mired in the old way of doing things. Why can’t a president change things?”

Eventually he says: “You can be a conservative and still solve problems for people.”

Reading up on Bush’s record and talking about it with the (worshipful) people who helped make it happen, you might start to wonder: Is he pulling a Reverse Bush? For years conservative Republicans accused his father and brother of being closet moderates who only talked like conservatives for the sake of politics; the charge was generally accurate. Maybe Jeb is reversing the trick: a self-conscious, deep-dyed conservative who for the moment feels the need to look like a moderate, especially before an admiring press and in the company of the wealthy Republicans who these days are his constant companions and marks. 

It’s a dicey strategy, if it’s a strategy at all. His constant refrain—he will use government according to conservative principles to help people—may fall flat in a party whose members, lots of them, don’t think they want government to help them at all; they just want it to leave them alone. Republicans still laugh at the old joke about the biggest lie: “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help you.” Can Jeb Bush persuade them it’s not a joke after all?

His education, and ours, continues. 

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.