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John Ellis "Jeb" Bush (born February 11, 1953) is the forty-third and current Governor of Florida. He is a prominent member of the Bush family: the younger brother of President George W. Bush, older brother of Neil Bush, and second son of former President George H. W. Bush.
Early years
Jeb Bush was born in Midland, Texas where his father was running an oil drilling company. He has been known by his initials JEB, since childhood. When he was six years old, the family moved to Houston, Texas. He was a childhood athlete enjoying baseball and tennis. He went to a public elementary school, but later transferred to a private school. When he was in eighth grade, his father won a seat in Congress and moved to Washington, DC. Jeb stayed in Houston with another family and finished the school year there.
He then enrolled in Andover, an elite private high school in Massachusetts. He described his time there as "a cynical little turd in a cynical little school". He admitted to squealing tires and smoking marijuana while a student there. When he was seventeen, he went to León, Mexico, as part of a student exchange program. While attending a motorcycle race, he met a local girl named Columba Garnica Gallo. They married three years later. Jeb Bush now speaks English and Spanish fluently.
He attended the University of Texas at Austin and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree in Latin American Affairs in 1973, taking only two and a half years. He registered for the draft, but the Vietnam War ended before his number came up.
Early career
After graduating, Bush married Columba Garnica Gallo in 1974. They now have three children, George P., Noelle and John E. "Jeb", Jr. He then went to work for Texas Commerce Bank, which was partly owned by his father's friend and the future United States Secretary of State, James Baker. His starting salary was about $8,000 a year. In November 1977, he was sent to Caracas to open a bank branch. He spent about two years there, working in international finance. He returned to the United States to work on his father's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. His father ultimately lost, but was nominated and elected as the vice president.
Following the election, Jeb Bush and his family moved to Dade County, Florida outside of Miami. He took a job in real estate with Armando Codina, then a 32 year old Cuban immigrant. Codina had made millions in a computer business and just formed IntrAmerica Investments Inc. to pursue opportunities in real estate. Codina paid Bush $41,508 in 1981. However, Bush soon became a valuable salesman for Codina and made a lot of money on commissions. His name and connections to his father, the vice president, opened doors to important clients.
In his years in Miami, he was involved in a number of business dealings including a mobile phone company, he served on the board of a Norwegian-owned company that sold fire equipment to the Alaska oil pipeline, he was a minority owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, he bought a shoe company that sold footwear in Panama, and a scheme to sell water pumps in Nigeria.
After his father was elected President, Bush's real estate development company took off. He and Cordina changed the name to Cordina-Bush and it became one of South Florida's leading real estate development firms. Bush got 40% of the profits of the firm. But in June 1993, Jeb sold his share of the company Codina for over one million dollars in order to run for office.
Political career
Early campaigns
Bush got his start in Florida politics as the Chairman of the Dade County Republican Party. Dade County played an important role in the 1986 election of Bob Martinez to the Governor's office. In return, Martinez appointed Bush as Florida's Secretary of Commerce. He served in that role in 1987 and 1988, before resigning once again to work on his father's presidential campaign.
He launched an unsuccessful bid for the governor's office in 1994 against incumbent Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles. He also narrowly avoided scandal after the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing in 1995 when he refused to renounce his parish priest's assertions that the bombing was God's way of punishing our society for allowing more liberal attitudes towards women and gays. Fortunately for Bush, the local media quickly dropped the story and Bush remained focused on mounting a second attempt at running for governor.
Governor of Florida
In 1998, Bush defeated Democratic opponent Buddy MacKay (55% to 45%) to become governor, after courting moderate voters and Hispanics. Simultaneously, his brother George W. Bush won a landslide re-election victory for a second term as Governor of Texas, and the Bush brothers became the first siblings to govern two states at the same time since Nelson and Winthrop Rockefeller governed New York and Arkansas from 1967 to 1971.
His administration has been marked by a focus on public education reform. Bush's "A+ Plan" mandated standardized testing in Florida's public schools and established a system of funding public schools based on a statewide grading system. Bush has been a proponent of school vouchers and charter schools, especially in areas of the state with failing public schools, although to date very few schools have received failing grades from the state. One program that has seen fruition is the Florida Virtual High School, a distance-learning program that allows students in rural areas of the state to take Advanced Placement classes for college credit.
Bush has also been a vocal advocate of environmentalism, passing legislation to protect the Everglades and opposing his brother's plans to drill for oil off the coast of Florida. Like most Republicans, he is perceived as being generally pro-business, and has worked to keep taxes low in Florida.
He has been the subject of several high-profile controversies. Among these, the most well-known on a national scale is his involvement in the 2000 presidential election, in which his brother's victory over Democratic candidate Al Gore was secured through a complicated process of recounts and court battles in Florida. Bush has been accused of helping his brother prevail in this process.
There have also been claims of political hypocrisy. Jeb Bush's daughter Noelle Bush was sent into rehabilitation for her drug use, while Jeb Bush simultaneously called for harsh punishment of nonviolent drug offenders (and actively opposed a ballot initiative that would send them into treatment instead).
Jeb Bush's business dealings have attracted controversy. An October 2002 report in the Miami Herald details Bush's involvement in a questionable Nigerian deal, where money was allegedly used to bribe government officials for approval of a $74 million water pump sale that was mostly financed by US foreign aid.
Most recently, Bush involved himself in the case of Terri Schiavo, a woman on full life support whose husband intended to euthanize her [her parents opposed allowing her to die]. Bush, who is staunchly pro-life, passed "Terri's Law," an assertion of executive authority that permitted him to keep Schiavo alive. This law has been extensively challenged in the courts and as of Januray 24 2005, was rejected by the US Supreme Court. While this is still being appealed, its life as legislation slowly appears to be coming to an end.
Despite these controversies, Bush's policies have remained popular overall in Florida. He was re-elected in November 2002, becoming the first Republican in the state's history to be re-elected as governor. He defeated Democrat Bill McBride by a slightly greater margin than in 1998 (56% to 44%). Upon leaving office at the end of his term in 2007, he will become only the second Florida governor to complete two full four year terms in office, the first being Reubin O'D. Askew.
One of the most important endeavors now is to secure the FTAA Secretariat for Miami. Miami will become to the Americas what Brussels is now in Europe.
Political future
Jeb Bush is widely considered to be a rising star of the Republican Party; there was some speculation that he might run for President himself in 2008. However, on October 17, 2004 he officially took himself out of the running (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=173616&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312) in the 2008 election. Some have since speculated that Bush may run against Democrat Bill Nelson in the 2006 Senate election.
He is seen as extremely popular among Cubans in Florida (winning 80% of the Cuban vote in 2002), and moderately popular among non-Cuban Hispanics (56% in 2002, equaling the 56% he won statewide). Bush has also been active in the Project for the New American Century, whose goal is to promote American global leadership.
References
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Jeb Bush
External links
Official Governor's portrait and biography from the State of Florida (http://dhr.dos.state.fl.us/museum/collections/governors/about.cfm?id=50)
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