Gov. Jeb Bush (R) Elected 1998, 2d term up Jan. 2007
Born:	Feb. 11, 1953, Midland, TX
Home:	Miami
Education:	U. of TX, B.A. 1974
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Columba)
Elected  Office:	FL Commerce Secy., 1987-88; Candidate for FL Gov., 1994.
Professional Career:	Pres. & COO, Codina Group, 1981-94; Founder & Chmn., Foundation for Florida's Future, 1995-98.
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Jeb Bush, son of President George H. W. Bush and brother of President George W. Bush, was elected governor of Florida in 1998 and 2002. Jeb grew up in Midland and Houston, Texas. He majored in Latin American studies at the University of Texas and there met his wife, Columba, who is originally from Mexico. He speaks Spanish fluently--but with more of a Mexican than Cuban accent, he notes. In 1981 he moved to Miami and started a real estate development company. For a year or so, he was Commerce secretary under Republican Governor Bob Martinez. With a well-known name and strong convictions on issues, he decided to run against Governor Lawton Chiles in 1994, vanquishing competition in the Republican primary and leading in polls during most of the fall. He called for fewer appeals for death row inmates and speedier executions, said Florida should withdraw from Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replace it with limited temporary assistance, and called for school choice and demanded voter approval of all state and local tax increases. There was a rigid tone to Bush's campaign; when one black man asked him what he would do to help him, Bush replied, "Probably nothing." Chiles started emphasizing his "cracker" roots and called himself "the he-coon [who] always walks before the light of day." The result was a 51%-49% Chiles victory.

Bush immediately started running again. He set up a foundation that produced intellectually serious proposals for changing government and visited shelters for abused women and children in foster care. Challenged by the teachers' union head to spend more time in classrooms, he visited more than 200 schools and, with the Urban League of Miami, founded and taught at a charter school in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood. While his positions on issues did not change much, his approach and his tone did. The consensus in Florida had been moving for some time toward Bush--Chiles had produced welfare and reinventing government reforms--and now Bush came some distance toward the consensus.

Bush entered 1998 as the heavy favorite for governor while Democrats inflicted damage on themselves. Democrats noisily looked for alternatives to the likely nominee, Lieutenant Governor Buddy MacKay, though MacKay had received good press for his work in office and nearly beat Connie Mack for senator in 1988. Bush won 55%-45%.

With a Republican legislature, Bush got off to a fast start. But in mid-1999 Bush was alarmed when Ward Connerly, sponsor of California's 1996 Proposition 209 which outlawed state government racial quotas and preferences, moved to put a similar proposition on the Florida ballot. Bush said Connerly would start a "war" and in November 1999 put forward his own One Florida proposal, to curtail quotas and set-asides in state contracts, get rid of quotas and preferences in state colleges and universities and replace them by guaranteeing places in the state's 10 public colleges to the top 20% of every high school graduating class. In 2000 Bush continued to have success with the legislature, cutting taxes by $500 million, spending $6 billion on roads and getting a $2 billion, 10-year commitment to the bipartisan program to restore the Everglades.

Jeb Bush did not take a highly visible role in the 2000 presidential campaign. He seldom traveled outside Florida and spoke only every week or so with his brother George W. Bush. A more visible role was played by Jeb Bush's 24-year-old son, George P. Bush, who made appearances before Hispanic audiences, cut a TV spot in Spanish and English and spoke at the podium of the Republican National Convention. In the controversy over Florida's vote, Jeb Bush recused himself from the three-member board of elections, substituting Agriculture Commissioner Bob Crawford, a Democrat who had endorsed George W. Bush; charges that he orchestrated Secretary of State Katherine Harris' decisions to certify George W. Bush as the winner have foundered for lack of evidence. He did say that he would sign a proclamation by the Florida legislature that the Republican electors had won, but there was nothing to back the charges that somehow the governor of Florida had stolen the election for his brother. The day after the election was decided, he appeared with officials of both parties and announced the formation of a bipartisan commission to study Florida's election procedures. In March 2001 it came forward with its recommendations, including getting rid of punch card ballots, leasing optical scanning equipment for all counties for the 2002 election and setting a uniform standard for recounts; an election reform bill was signed by Governor Bush in May 2001.

In 2001 Bush persisted in pushing tax cuts even though the amount of unallocated funds was falling. In January 2001 he attracted national attention when he called on the Interior Department to cancel planned oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico off the Alabama coast. Florida politicians of both parties have long opposed oil drilling in the Gulf off the Florida coast, and Bush claimed that drilling nearby would endanger Florida beaches and threaten the tourism industry; in May, Dick Cheney said the administration favored drilling. In January 2002 the Bushes signed an agreement to implement the Everglades restoration plan approved by Congress by spending $7.8 billion over 30 years to restore 2.4 million acres and provide an extra 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water yearly to south Florida. In October 2001 Bush summoned a special session of the legislature to cut spending to account for a $1.3 billion shortfall in a $51 billion budget; the result was $450 million in spending cuts and a delay in the intangibles tax cut. In January 2002 he presented a budget with just a 1% increase in spending, higher tuition at universities and community colleges, elimination of 3,000 state jobs and continuation of 2001 spending cuts. Still, Florida's fiscal problems were not as great as those in some states; at the end of a year it was one of 10 states seen as expecting revenue increases.

On other issues, Bush in 2001 negotiated rebates with pharmaceutical companies saving 15% on the Medicaid budget and signed an end to the death penalty for the retarded. In July 2002 he named his first nominee to the Florida Supreme Court, Raoul Cantero, a grandson of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. In the summer of 2002 he faced two unhappy incidents, both with likely negative impact on his reelection campaign. In 1998 he had criticized the performance of the state Department of Children and Families and promised to change the agency's supervision of foster parents. Over the next three years the agency's budget was doubled, it reduced the amount of time children spent in foster care and it promoted a hotline for reporting child abuse. But in April 2002 it turned out that the department had lost track of a Miami girl, Rilya Wilson; in the next four months, three children under its supervision were found dead. The agency admitted in July 2002 that it could not account for the whereabouts of 500 children under its supervision; the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel set about finding some of them and found nine, including two in three hours. In August 2002 agency head Kathleen Kearney resigned.

The other incident was personal. In January 2002 Bush's adult daughter Noelle Bush was arrested in Tallahassee for trying to buy Xanax, an anti-anxiety agent, without a prescription. She was ordered to a drug treatment center in Orlando. In July 2002 she was sent to the Orange County jail when she was found in possession of stolen prescription drugs, though she tested negative. This was big news nationally and of course in Florida. Bush went on the Today show in mid-October and discussed the painful ordeal. Noelle Bush attended her father's inaugural ceremonies in January 2003 on a one-day pass, and he spoke movingly of the need for strong families to solve problems government cannot fix.

During the December 2000 controversy over Florida's presidential vote and for months after, angry Democrats predicted that Florida voters would defeat Jeb Bush in 2002 in revenge for what happened. But Democrats needed a candidate. Senators Bob Graham and Bill Nelson worked to recruit former 2d District Congressman Pete Peterson, a POW for six years during the Vietnam war. He was the kind of Democrat who had carried Florida in the past--from a rural and small town area, with a moderate voting record, not visibly connected to the teachers' unions and trial lawyers who are the organizational and financial bulwark of the Florida Democratic party. On September 4, 2001, another kind of candidate announced: former Attorney General Janet Reno, from Miami-Dade County, with a liberal record and well positioned to win primary votes from blacks and women. But Reno also had high negatives ratings from general election voters and seemed poorly positioned to carry voters Democrats need to win in November. On September 22, Peterson announced he was not running. Two legislators, state Senator Darryl Jones and state Representative Lois Frankel, were also looking to run; they seemed unlikely to raise enough money to beat Reno and their liberal records would be a problem in the general election.

So, as Reno drove her red pickup truck around the state, Democratic insiders looked for another candidate and found him in Bill McBride, from 1992 to 2001 managing partner of Tampa's Holland & Knight, the largest law firm in Florida. McBride was unknown to the voting public, but had an interesting biography and plenty of politically useful connections. He grew up in the small town of Leesburg, the son of a TV repairman; he gave up a football scholarship after his knee was injured and worked his way through school; he left law school to enlist in the Marine Corps and was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam. The driving force behind McBride's candidacy was the state's teacher's unions, who resented Bush's A-plus program for highlighting teacher performance and providing private school alternatives for children in failing schools. He announced his candidacy in June 2001 and was endorsed by the state AFL-CIO in April 2002.

Neither McBride nor Reno advanced platforms with much in the way of specifics. Darryl Jones did, with a $3.5 billion plan for education, but he had little backing outside the black community and did not raise much money; Lois Frankel withdrew from the race, unable to make headway against Reno. Reno called for health care and schooling for preschoolers; McBride called for a 50-cent increase in the cigarette tax to increase spending on education. The universally known Reno led in early primary polls, and she much free publicity driving her red truck around: appearing on the Tonight show with Jay Leno, at an Oscar party with Elton John, appearing late in the campaign on Saturday Night Live. But she raised little money and, unlike McBride, took little advantage of the state party's offer of money for administrative expenses. McBride did raise a lot of money, some $3 million by the primary. His obvious strategy was to concede the Gold Coast to Reno and advertise heavily in the I-4 corridor and north Florida media markets. It proved effective. In the weeks before the September 10 primary McBride was running even with Reno in the polls.

The primary turned out to be, Florida fashion, nearly a tie. McBride led in the first count by 8,196 votes out of 1.3 million cast, and was certified as the winner September 12. But Miami-Dade County, where Reno led by a wide margin, had not prepared to handle the new voting equipment, and was still counting votes. Florida's revised election laws require a recount if the margin is less than 0.5% of the vote, and Reno demanded a recount as the vote hovered just outside that. On September 17 Miami-Dade votes came in; Reno, still behind by 4,794 votes, 44.4%-44.0% conceded and endorsed McBride. But his campaign had lost a week of an already short general election campaign. Florida law usually requires a runoff when no candidate gets 50%, but Bush and the Republican legislature passed a law suspending the runoff for 2002 only, presumably because they hoped Reno would win a plurality and did not want to see McBride overtake her in an early October runoff and obtain momentum for November.

The early 2001 talk that this election would be a referendum on the Bush presidency was obviously wrong after September 11, when it was clear that George W. Bush's performance was much more important than and quite different from the issues raised in the Florida governor's race. The chief issue turned out to be one pushed by McBride's teachers' union allies: Amendment 9, which would put into Florida's constitution a requirement that class size would be reduced to 18 in grades K-3, 22 in grades 4-8 and 25 in grades 9-12 by 2010. Proponents said it would cost only $4 billion over seven years; Bush cited a state government study saying that it would cost $27 billion--a huge amount in a state whose budgets have been hovering around $50 billion. When it qualified for the November ballot, Bush strongly opposed it, and proposed his own program for $2.8 billion over five years to build 12,000 new classrooms. McBride, who called Bush's A-plus program a "mirage" and an "illusion" and his testing program "foolish," strongly supported it. Under state law the estimated cost of a ballot proposition has to be put on the ballot; but a Florida judge, in a move that would not surprise those who remember the 2000 Florida ballot controversy, ruled it unnecessary.

At first, Bush seemed to stumble on the issue. On October 3, in a Capitol conversation with three Pensacola area legislators witnessed by a Gannett News Service reporter, Bush talked about how he would respond if Amendment 9 passed. "We're going to have to cut nursing homes. So I've got a couple of devious plans if this thing passes. … We might want to have another look at it." He suggested that taxes might have to be raised and talked about getting the voters to repeal the amendment in 2004. The next day his words were in Gannett's Pensacola News Journal and a tape of him speaking them was on the paper's website.

McBride's primary win had provided him enough momentum, and had given him enough of a moderate image; in one October poll, after the "devious plans" story, he trailed by only 48%-43%. But Bush proceeded to bombard television viewers with ads citing his accomplishments and attacking McBride for saying different things to different audiences, hinting that he was a hidden liberal indebted to the teachers' unions and charging that his proposal to eliminate Bush's testing would cost the state $2.5 billion in federal aid. On October 22 the candidates held a debate moderated by Meet the Press host Tim Russert. Bush answered questions with mastery of knowledge of state government. McBride was charmingly talkative but unspecific. When Russert asked him whether Amendment 9 would cost $3 billion as some proponents claimed or $27 billion as Bush claimed, McBride conceded it could cost as much as $15 billion. His response gave credence to Bush ads that charged that McBride's overexpansion at Holland & Knight showed that as an executive he was overoptimistic and inclined to overspending.

In late October Bush surged farther ahead in polls; on Election Day, he won by the impressive margin of 56%-43%. Bush appears to have carried Hispanic precincts throughout the state and had huge margins in Cuban areas in Miami-Dade County. He lost ground compared to 1998 in Tallahassee and in small north Florida counties with universities, prisons or other state facilities: his Service First overhauls of the state personnel system and privatization of non-core functions of state agencies made him unpopular with public employee unions. Bush lost the Gold Coast by only 54%-46%; he carried the I-4 corridor by a solid 58%-41% and carried the other counties in the south 62%-37% and in the north 59%-40%. Republican Charlie Crist was elected attorney general over Democrat Buddy Dwyer 53%-47%, completing the Republican sweep of statewide offices. Republican margins were increased in the state Senate to 26-14 and the state House to 81-39. Moreover, those margins seem firm: only three Senate races and 12 House races were won with less than 55% of the vote. McBride said he would not run again.

After the election, Bush said his goals for his second term were higher reading scores, a more diverse economy, a renewal of a spirit of community and strengthening of families, "BHAGs," as he put it, "big, hairy, audacious goals." But he was faced with one big problem: Amendment 9 passed by a 52%-48% margin, far less than it had in polls, but enough to impose unknown new obligations on state government. The text of the amendment left unanswered how class size should be calculated. In January 2003 Bush and incoming Speaker Johnnie Byrd said they would support a tax increase; incoming state Senate President Jim King said, "An increase in taxes, though certainly not what any of us wants, will have to be considered." In his inaugural address, Bush sounded a note that irritated many Democrats, when he said he looked forward to the day when state buildings in Tallahassee will lie empty as "silent monuments to a time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill." More than most governors, he seems guided by a philosophy that makes him willing to risk political confrontation and more than most governors, he has shown an ability to prevail.

As the son and brother of presidents, a distinction he shares with only his own brothers and John Quincy Adams's, he has often been mentioned as a candidate for president himself in 2008. He has professed to find the notion incredible. "It's like talking about whatever that group is from outer space. Raelians."

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Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent
2002 general	Jeb Bush (R)	2,856,845	56%
	Bill McBride (D)	2,201,427	43%
2002 primary	Jeb Bush (R)	unopposed
1998 general	Jeb Bush (R)	2,192,105	55%
	Buddy MacKay (D)	1,773,054	45%