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POLITICS | NYT NOW
Jeb Bush Gives Party Something to Think About
By MICHAEL BARBARO MAY 24, 2014
As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush flew in Ivy League social scientists for
daylong seminars with his staff and carved out time for immersive
brainstorming sessions he called think weeks.
A voracious reader, he maintains a queue of 25 volumes on his Kindle
(George Gilders Knowledge and Power among them, he said) and
routinely sends fan mail to his favorite authors.
A self-described nerd, he is known to travel with policy journals and
send all-hours inquiries to think tanks. (A sample Bush question: What are
the top five ways to achieve 4 percent economic growth?)
As Mr. Bush, 61, weighs whether to seek the Republican presidential
nomination in 2016, he is dogged by fears of voter exhaustion with a
family name indelibly linked to his older brother, a self-assured Texan who
prized instinct over expertise and once acknowledged a lack of interest in
slogging through long books.
But in ways big and small, deliberate or subconscious, the younger
Mr. Bush seems to have defined himself as the anti-George W. Bush: an
intellectual in search of new ideas, a serial consulter of outsiders who
relishes animated debate and a probing manager who eagerly burrows
into the bureaucratic details.
Allies said that reputation as what the Republican strategist Karl
Rove called the deepest thinker on our side could prove vital in selling
Mr. Bush as a presidential candidate to an electorate still scarred by
George W. Bushs legacy of costly wars abroad and economic meltdown at
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home.
But the bookishness and pragmatism that strike mainstream
Republican leaders as virtues highlight the potential difficulty that Mr.
Bush may face in igniting the passions of more conservative members of
the party.
The questions he grapples with most frequently, and enthusiastically,
revolve around improving the effectiveness of government in areas like
education, immigration and criminal justice. It is a message unlikely to
electrify Tea Party and libertarian wings of his party that are openly hostile
to the very idea of government.
There is skepticism that maybe Jeb Bush wants too much
government in peoples lives, said Greg Mueller, a Republican strategist
who has advised the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan, Steve
Forbes and Bob Dole. I dont know that he will ever win over the limited-
government conservatives.
Mr. Bush, who has cast himself as a party reformer, seems unfazed by
such critiques: At times, he has appeared to deliberately fan them by
publicly castigating the leaders of his own party for adhering to failed
tactics and outdated messages.
After Mitt Romneys resounding defeat in 2012, in a presidential
campaign that struggled to leaven its harsh tone with an optimistic vision
for governing, Mr. Bush was unsparing, warning that the Republican
brand risked becoming a millstone, associated with being anti-
everything. Much of the electorate, he said, believes that Republicans are
anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker.
Those who have hashed over policy and politics with Mr. Bush
describe him as a conservative animated less by rigid ideology than a
technocrats quest to identify which solutions work best.
Hes not interested in proving some sort of conservative point that
less government is better, though he might believe that, said Philip K.
Howard, the author of influential books about law and government, who
has spoken frequently with Mr. Bush. In all of my dealings with him, hes
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interested in how you make government deliver effectively. What are the
incentives? How do you hold people accountable? He added: These are
the discussions, frankly, that you want government leaders to have.
Friends and former aides have variously described him as a policy
wonk, an ideas junkie and, as Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the
American Enterprise Institute, called him, a top-drawer intellect.
It is a cerebral image that Mr. Bush readily and conspicuously
embraces, inviting inevitable and not always flattering comparisons
with his brother. (While George W. Bush, 67, left Yale with gentlemans Cs
after four years, Jeb Bush raced through the University of Texas in two
and a half, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.) He insisted, for example, that his
official portrait as governor contain a bookcase filled with his most
beloved titles, among them Cross Creek, a memoir by Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings.
These days, the younger Mr. Bush peppers his speeches with statistics,
academic-sounding references to quintiles and self-deprecating jokes
about his own geekiness. A few weeks ago, he boasted to a crowd of
Republican donors that he was nerdy enough to read City Journal, an
obscure policy magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, a
conservative think tank, then recited the names of his favorite writers at
the publication.
Aubrey Jewett, who has studied Jeb Bush as a professor of political
science at the University of Central Florida, said he seems to go out of his
way to make it clear that hes different from his brother, by the way he
talks about himself, his goals and the details of public policy.
And how he governed. Under Mr. Bush, who served from 1999 to
2007, the Florida governors office at times resembled a mini-university.
New employees showed up to find a copy of a treasured Bush book on their
desks: A Message to Garcia, the inspirational 1899 essay about a United
States soldier who journeyed to Cuba to win the alliance of a rebel leader.
He created a speakers series, inviting Colin L. Powell, the former
secretary of state, and Virginia Postrel, a prominent cultural writer, to the
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Statehouse to speak to his cabinet. And he participated in an informal staff
book club that churned through works of literary fiction, like Zora Neale
Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God, and sociological tracts,
including Robert Putnams Bowling Alone.
The approach, aides said, suffused his government, which became a
hothouse for ambitious, mostly conservative policy programs. They
included assigning A through F grades to public schools, offering
performance bonuses to government workers, privatizing many public
services and, through billions of dollars in land purchases, locking in the
conservation of the Everglades.
It was this culture of creativity and intellectual curiosity, said Brian
Yablonski, who ran Mr. Bushs policy office and remains a confidant. It
permeated everything.
Even Mr. Bushs time off. Inspired by Bill Gates, he sent out a request
to current and former staff members for bold new ideas, serious or
whimsical, and took the resulting stack of proposals with him on vacation
for think week. (One proposal: allowing Florida towns to buy and sell
water on the open market, like electricity.)
Not everyone was impressed. Democratic-leaning outsiders groused
that his administration had been co-opted by conservative think tanks, like
the Hoover, Cato and Manhattan institutes, whose proposals Mr. Bush
openly borrowed.
I dont think he had any ideas of his own, said Robert E. Crew Jr.,
an associate dean at Florida State University who chronicled Mr. Bushs
governorship in a 2009 book, Jeb Bush: Aggressive Conservatism in
Florida.
But there is little dispute over Mr. Bushs firm command of
governments smallest details. He surprised aides by reading voluminous
bills in their entirety and embarrassed ill-prepared advisers with his
mastery of their projects.
Allison DeFoor, a top environmental adviser to Mr. Bush, recalled
having to abruptly cut short his first briefing with the new governor, about
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the Everglades, amid a battery of questions that he was unable to answer.
Aides called the ignominious session Black Monday.
I have never been brought up that short in 40 years in government,
Mr. DeFoor said.
Just as daunting: keeping pace with Mr. Bushs crowded and sober-
minded reading list. I read more than one book at a time these days, he
said in an email. I think it is because its easy to download books on
Kindle.
Colleagues try their best. After she was repeatedly asked by Mr. Bush
what she was reading, Toni Jennings, one of his lieutenant governors,
scaled back her consumption of page-turning thrillers by James Patterson
and Harlan Coben.
Instead, she reluctantly switched over to her bosss brand of dense
nonfiction.
Sometimes, she conceded, it would take me a month to get through
those books.
A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014, on page A19 of the New York edition with
the headline: Jeb Bushs Image Gives G.O.P. Something to Think About Before 2016.
2014 The New York Times Company