Jeb Bush

John Ellis "Jeb" Bush (born February 11, 1953) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. He is the second son of former president George H. W. Bush and former first lady Barbara Bush, and a younger brother of former president George W. Bush. A member of the Republican Party, he was an unsuccessful candidate for president of the United States in the 2016 Republican primaries.

Bush was born into the prominent Bush family in Midland, Texas, and grew up in Houston. He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a degree in Latin American affairs. In 1980, Bush moved to Florida and pursued a career in real estate development. In 1987, he became Florida's secretary of commerce, serving this role until 1988, when he joined his father's successful campaign for the presidency.

In 1994, Bush made his first run for office, losing the election for governor by less than two percentage points to the incumbent Lawton Chiles. Bush ran again in 1998 and defeated lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay with 55 percent of the vote. He ended up succeeding MacKay after Chiles died in office 23 days shy of his retirement. He ran for reelection in 2002, defeating Bill McBride and winning with 56 percent, to become Florida's first two-term Republican governor. During his eight years as governor, Bush pushed an ambitious Everglades conservation plan, supported caps for medical malpractice litigation, launched a Medicaid privatization pilot program, and instituted reforms to the state education system, including the issuance of vouchers and promoting school choice.

Bush announced his presidential candidacy on June 15, 2015. He suspended his campaign on February 20, 2016, shortly after the South Carolina primary, and finished sixth out of 17 contesters by both delegates number and popular vote. He endorsed Senator Ted Cruz on March 23, 2016, and was critical of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, remaining so during Trump's presidencies.

Bush was born on February 11, 1953, in Midland, Texas. When he was six years old, the family relocated to the Tanglewood neighborhood of Houston, Texas. The nickname "Jeb" is composed of his initials J.E.B. (John Ellis Bush).

He grew up with two younger brothers, Neil and Marvin, one younger sister, Dorothy, one older brother, George, who is seven years older, and, for the first eight months of his life, an older sister, Robin. Jeb Bush initially attended Grady Elementary School in Houston. Following in the footsteps of his father and older brother George, at the age of 14 years in late 1967, Bush began attending high school at the Andover, Massachusetts boarding school Phillips Academy, Andover. Bush completed ninth grade in Houston, but was advised to repeat it at Andover, and was nearly expelled due to poor grades. Bush recreationally used marijuana, hashish, and cigarettes during his high school years, although he made the honor roll by the end of his senior year and served as captain of the tennis team.

At the age of 17, Bush taught English as a second language and assisted in the building of a school in Ibarrilla, a small village outside of León, Guanajuato, Mexico, as part of Andover's student exchange summer program. While in Mexico, he met his future wife, Columba Garnica Gallo.

Bush, who had largely avoided criticizing or supporting the Vietnam War, registered for the draft after his graduation from high school in 1971. In the fourth and final draft lottery drawing, on February 2, 1972, for men born in 1953 and to be inducted during 1973, Bush received a draft number of 26 on a calendar-based scale that went to 365. But no new draft orders were issued after 1972, because the U.S. changed to an all-volunteer military beginning in 1973.

Though many in his family had attended Yale University, Bush chose to attend the University of Texas at Austin, beginning in September 1971. He played on the Texas Longhorns varsity tennis team in 1973. Bush graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Latin American studies. He completed his coursework in two and a half years.

In 1974, Bush went to work in an entry-level position in the international division of Texas Commerce Bank, which was founded by the family of James Baker. In November 1977, he was sent to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, to open a new operation for the bank, where he served as branch manager and vice president.

Following the 1980 presidential election, Bush and his family moved to Miami-Dade County, Florida. He took a job in real estate with Armando Codina, a 32-year-old Cuban immigrant and self-made millionaire. Codina had made a fortune in a computer business, and then formed a new company, The Codina Group, to pursue opportunities in real estate. During his time with the company, Bush focused on finding tenants for commercial developments. Codina eventually made Bush his partner in a new development business, which quickly became one of South Florida's leading real estate development firms. As a partner, Bush received 40% of the firm's profits. In 1983, Bush said of his move from Houston to Miami: "On the personal side, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law were already living here." On the professional side, "I want to be very wealthy, and I'll be glad to tell you when I've accomplished that goal."

During Bush's years in Miami, he was involved in many different entrepreneurial pursuits, including working for a mobile phone company, serving on the board of a Norwegian-owned company that sold fire equipment to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, becoming a minority owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, buying a shoe company that sold footwear in Panama, and getting involved in a project selling water pumps in Nigeria.

Bush was a lobbyist for Miguel Recarey, who ran International Medical Centres (IMC), a Florida-based health maintenance organization (HMO). Recarey "employed" Bush as a real estate consultant and paid him a US$75,000 fee for finding the company a new location, although the move never took place. Bush did, however, lobby the Reagan administration vigorously and successfully on behalf of Recarey and IMC to waive a rule of Medicare enrollee proportion. Recarey received US$781 million in Medicare payments for 197 000 enrollees but did not pay doctors and hospitals for their care. As of 2015 Recarey was a fugitive living in Spain. The IMC fraud was one of the largest in Medicare history.

Bush volunteered for his father's campaigns in 1980 and 1988. During the 1980 campaign, Bush worked as an unpaid volunteer, and expressed great admiration for his father. In 1984, Bush got his start in Florida politics by becoming 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. Despite statewide Republican leaders urging Bush and other county party officials to stay neutral in the Republican primary, Bush endorsed Martinez ahead of the runoff of the primary. In appreciation of Bush's support during his campaign, Martinez appointed him as Florida's secretary of commerce. Bush served in that role from 1987 to 1988, before resigning to work on his father's presidential campaign.

Bush frequently communicated with his father's staff from 1981 through 1992. The younger Bush recommended Dexter Lehtinen for the post of U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida and set up a meeting between the Bush administration and Motorola. He also advocated for Cuban exiles living in South Florida, and supported the Cuban embargo. In 1990, Bush urged his father to pardon Orlando Bosch, a Cuban exile who had been convicted of firing a rocket into a Polish ship which was on passage to Cuba. Bosch was released from prison and granted residency in the U.S.

In 1989, Bush was the campaign manager of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban-American to serve in Congress, in her special election.

In 1994, Bush launched an unsuccessful bid for the governor's office against incumbent Democratic governor Lawton Chiles. Bush ran that year as a conservative. At one point, he was asked what he would do for African Americans, and Bush responded: "It's time to strive for a society where there's equality of opportunity, not equality of results. So I'm going to answer your question by saying: probably nothing." Bush led through much of the campaign. Then with just a few weeks before election day, Bush ran a campaign ad featuring the mother of a 10-year-old girl who had been abducted and murdered many years before. The ad opened with pictures of the girl and then shifted to her mother who gave a description of her daughter's case and then said "Her killer is still on death row and we're still waiting for justice. We won't get it from Lawton Chiles because he's too liberal on crime. . . Lawton Chiles has let us down. . . I know Jeb Bush. He'll make criminals serve their sentences and enforce the death penalty. Lawton Chiles won't." The ad caused a storm of controversy. Florida prosecutors and former Supreme Court justices toured the state with Chiles saying that Bush didn't know what he was talking about. It was compared, including by a rankled Chiles, to the Willie Horton ad run on behalf of Bush's father in 1988. Bush further caused himself problems after being asked by reporters shortly after the ad started airing if signing death warrants immediately would have changed the outcome of the case by saying "No." With polls showing that voters had doubts about Bush's integrity, Chiles began pounding on the theme that Bush could not be trusted. In every commercial, no matter what the subject, Chiles ended with the tagline: "That's why we can't trust Jeb Bush with our future."

At the candidates last debate, the only one of the campaign held in prime time, moderator Tim Russert asked Bush how he could continue to justify running the ad that was "by your own admission, misleading." Bush responded that the ad was no longer being aired because it had "completed," but that he would have kept it on the air longer. He tried to justify running it by saying that Chiles was in his opinion, "liberal on crime," and hadn't yet acted on some other death warrants. Chiles said when it was his turn to respond that he had supported the death penalty all his life and that he had executed as many people as governor, eight, as the previous two administrations; that "as Governor, I hold the phone as they walk into the death chamber, I give the last command before they pull the switch." And then he said: "You put on this ad, Jeb. You knew it was false. You even admitted it was false. . . I'm ashamed that you would use the agony of a mother and the loss of her daughter in an ad like this. It's demagoguery, pure and simple. Every paper in the state has looked at that ad; everyone of them has said it is a new low. Your father had the record in the Willie Horton ad, but you've outdone that. And Jeb, I'll tell you how long you ran that ad, you ran that ad til' your polls started telling you you were taking a beating on it, and you still are taking a beating on it! It was a mistake, you shouldn't have done it," as whoops and applause rang out from Chiles partisans in the audience (incidentally, the girl in the ad's convicted killer would not be executed until 2013, during the administration of Governor Rick Scott).

Bush lost the election by only 63,940 votes out of 4,206,076 that were cast for the major party candidates (2,135,008; 51% to 2,071,068; 49%). In the same election year, his older brother, George, was elected Governor of Texas. Following his election loss, Bush joined the board of the Heritage Foundation and continued to work with Codina Partners. Alongside T. Willard Fair, the president of the Urban League's Miami affiliate, Bush helped to establish Florida's first charter school.

After the election Chiles admitted his campaign made scare calls in the final hours to senior citizens using phony organizations as fronts. The callers identified themselves as being from the nonexistent Citizens for Tax Fairness and falsely claimed that Tom Feeney, Bush's running mate, wanted to abolish Social Security and Medicare. Chiles maintained he did not find out about the calls until after the election.

Bush ran again for governor in 1998, defeating Democrat Buddy MacKay, who was lieutenant governor. Bush ran for reelection in 2002 to become Florida's first two-term Republican governor. During his eight years as governor, Bush was credited with initiating environmental improvements, such as conservation in the Everglades, supporting caps for medical malpractice litigation, moving medicaid recipients to private systems, and instituting reforms to the state education system, including the issuance of vouchers and promoting school choice. Bush was governor when his brother George won an intensely fought election recount in Florida to become president. Bush recused himself from any official role in the recount.

In 1998, Bush defeated his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Buddy MacKay, by over 418,000 votes (2,191,105; 55% to 1,773,054; 45%) to become Governor of Florida. He campaigned as a "consensus-building pragmatist". Simultaneously, his brother, George W. Bush won a re-election victory for a second term as Governor of Texas, and they became the first siblings to govern two states simultaneously since Nelson and Winthrop Rockefeller governed New York and Arkansas from 1967 to 1971.

In the 1998 election, Bush garnered 61 percent of the Hispanic vote and 14 percent of the African American vote.

Bush was unopposed in the 2002 Republican gubernatorial primary, and in the general election he faced Democratic challenger Bill McBride. They met for two debates, in the most expensive Florida gubernatorial election yet. Voting went smoothly. Bush defeated McBride 56% to 43%, a greater margin of victory than in 1998.

Bush won 44 percent of the state's Jewish vote in the 2002 race. Bush also won the white female vote in the swing-voting battleground of Central Florida's I-4 corridor. However, he was not able to replicate the same success with African American voters (like he had earlier in 1998), winning only 8 percent of the African American vote. He became the first Republican governor of Florida to win re-election.

According to political scientist Susan MacManus from the University of South Florida, "In Florida, [Bush is] still perceived as conservative, especially on fiscal issues and even on social issues."

Outside of Florida, fellow Republican leaders throughout the country have sought Bush's aid both on and off the campaign trail. Bush's out-of-state campaign visits include Kentucky, where Republican challenger Ernie Fletcher appeared with Bush and won that state's governorship in 2003, ending a 32-year streak of Democratic governors. In the first few months of 2014, Bush campaigned for New Mexico governor Susana Martinez, Nevada governor Brian Sandoval, Senator Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and David Jolly who won a special congressional election in Florida.

Bush has been criticized by some in the Tea Party as not being sufficiently conservative, as he supports positions on immigration and Common Core that are unpopular with some conservatives. Bush publicly criticized the national Republican party for its adherence to "an orthodoxy that doesn't allow for disagreement" on June 11, 2012. In comments shared with Bloomberg View, Bush suggested that Ronald Reagan and his father would "have had a hard time" finding support in the contemporary GOP.

In October 2013, Bush called for passage of immigration reform. In April 2014, Bush said of illegal immigration: "It's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime. There should be a price paid, but it shouldn't rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families."

From 2004 to 2007, Bush served as a board member for the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB). Created by Congress, the board's purpose is to establish policy on reports examining K-12 students' academic progress in America's public and private schools. Since then Bush's education foundation has advocated for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. In October 2013, referring to opponents of the standards, Bush said that while "criticisms and conspiracy theories are easy attention grabbers", he instead wanted to hear their solutions to the problems in American education.

Bush had been considered a potential candidate in the 2016 presidential election since the end of the 2012 election. On October 2, 2014, George W. Bush said that his brother "wants to be President". On December 16, 2014, Bush announced via Facebook that he would be "actively exploring" a 2016 run to become President of the United States and at the end of the year resigned from several corporate boards.

In February 2015, Bush released several thousand emails from his time as governor online. Most of the emails are in the public record under Florida's Sunshine Laws. However, Bush created controversy by releasing some emails that included some personal details such as social security numbers, names, and addresses, as well as the contents of the messages. Bush's campaign team subsequently redacted the personal information.

By extending the exploration mode of his potential candidacy to a six-month period (his scheduled announcement came one day short of six months into his exploratory phase), Bush used his time to get acquainted with the press, court donors, and prepare a strategy. In doing this, he navigated several campaign finance laws which limit donations and prohibit coordination with Super PACs. This included delaying his official announcement to run, in order to circumvent the cap on primary donations of $2,700 per individual. In May 2015, it was reported that Bush had been raising money since January 2015, estimated to be close to US$100 million, for his super PAC, Right to Rise.

Bush announced his candidacy on June 15, 2015, at a multicultural campus of Miami Dade College. According to Reuters, Bush characterized himself as a moderate Republican who still has conservative principles; he promised immigration reform, spoke fluent Spanish, mentioned his wife's Mexican origins, and criticized Hillary Clinton. David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, said: "It's pretty hard for [Republicans] to win the White House if current Hispanic voting trends continue. (Bush) has some unique abilities to appeal to those voters and he's going to maximize them."

After a series of poor results in Iowa and New Hampshire, Bush spent his remaining money and campaign effort on the South Carolina primary. He placed fourth with under 8% of the vote. That night, Bush suspended his campaign, ending his presidential bid, and subsequently endorsed Texas senator Ted Cruz. In an analysis of what went wrong, Politico argues: "His slow, awkward stumble from August through October encapsulates everything that caused the operation viewed as 'Jeb!, Inc.' to fail. Bush was on the wrong side of the most galvanizing issues for Republican primary voters, he himself was a rusty and maladroit campaigner and his campaign was riven by internal disagreements and a crippling fear that left them paralyzed and unable to react to Trump." In May 2016, Bush announced he would vote neither for Trump nor Clinton.