The power of family politics

President Bush pulls out all the stops to help his brother in a tight race in Florida. He may reap the rewards in 2004.

[Times photo (2002): Bill Serne] President Bush shares a moment with Gov. Jeb Bush while visiting St. Petersburg in March.

By SARA FRITZ and LUCY MORGAN
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 22, 2002

No one could fault George W. Bush if he remembered Jan. 17, 1995, as the day he showed the skeptics he was every bit as smart as his younger brother Jeb.

George had just been elected governor of Texas. Jeb, who was seen as the brother most likely to succeed in politics, had narrowly lost a close race for governor of Florida.

A proud mother, a teary-eyed father and other relatives, all mindful of George's young adult years as a heavy drinker and underachiever, had gathered to see him take the oath of office in Austin.

It was at that moment the eldest son of the nation's 41st president reclaimed the birthright he had almost frittered away, and re-established himself as the No. 1 son of a prominent American political dynasty.

President Bush does not remember it that way.

Instead, he recalls the disconsolate frown on Jeb's face as he watched the inauguration of the new Texas governor. Even now, after being elected president, George tells friends he feels uncomfortable when he looks at a photograph from that day because his brother was so unhappy.

"The joy is in Texas," their father explained at the time, "but our hearts are in Florida."

Now George is investing his heart and the political and policymaking power of the presidency in Florida, where Jeb is in an unexpectedly tight race to win re-election.

"He's pulling out all the stops to help his brother," says John Kohut, analyst for the Cook Political Report.

The president has traveled to Florida 11 times over the past two years, and he may make another trip before the election. He has encouraged his cabinet officers, fundraisers and political advisers to call attention to the Florida governor's work. The Bush brothers discuss strategy frequently by telephone, and members of their staffs hold a weekly conference call to trade information.

On Monday, the president also took a dramatic step to assist Republican candidates, including his brother, who are running in areas with a high concentration of senior voters. His administration will take action to speed the availability of lower-priced generic drugs, a move the president did not support when it was under consideration in Congress.

"I am proud of my bother," the president tells Floridians whenever he can. "He's doing a really good job here in Florida."

Of course, George's attentiveness to Jeb is not strictly a matter of botherly love. By helping Jeb, he is also helping himself.

As their mother, Barbara, recently told a Florida audience: Her oldest son's chances of being re-elected president in 2004 could depend on whether the GOP retains control of the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee.

"So please," she said, begging her elderly audience to vote for Jeb, "think of the mother!"

Frequent visitors

The scene reminded some observers of a line borrowed from an old ethnic joke. How many Bush cabinet secretaries does it take to introduce a new species of bug into the Everglades?

In April, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton showed up at Everglades Holiday Park with hundreds of bugs from Australia, known as melaleuca psyllid. The bugs are intended to check the growth of the Everglades' biggest problem, the Australian melaleuca tree.

Under ordinary circumstances, the task of releasing these bugs might have fallen to a humble government scientist or a lowly bureaucrat. But the presence of two Bush cabinet members underscored the message that the administration was knocking itself out to preserve the environment in Florida.

The federal government has been so attentive to Florida in the past two years that the New Republic has accused the president of improperly favoring Jeb with federal funds.

"In other words," the magazine said in a July article, "if you pay taxes, you're probably helping to re-elect the president's brother."

Democrats are quick to cite examples.

They point to the most obvious favor the president did for his brother, which pre-emptively foreclosed an environmental issue that might have been used against Jeb in the election. The Interior Department decided to limit the number of new oil and gas leases that the federal government would sell in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ryan Banfill, spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party, noted that this decision was a departure from the Bush administration's policy elsewhere. In California, the administration has not agreed to buy back all of the offshore leases as proposed by Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat.

In addition, Jeb has boasted of getting $8-billion from the federal government for Everglades restoration; 25 more U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Florida Keys; seven Medicaid waivers, which gave the state an extra $159-million; a $300-million grant for Just Read Florida, a six-year program that focuses on elementary school children; $19.7-million to increase security at Florida seaports; and $46.3-million for bioterrorism programs.

Some of this money would have been bestowed on Florida regardless of the Bush brothers' connection. Federal grants are usually allocated according to strict formulas or congressional earmarks. But the timing of the grants and the personal visits by top federal officials has helped maximize the political impact for Jeb.

On July 31, for example, the U.S. Senate rejected legislation to provide a drug benefit for seniors, a move that surely would disappoint Medicare beneficiaries in Florida. To soften the blow, the president choose the same day to grant Jeb a special federal waiver that would allow Florida to offer drug coverage to low-income seniors through the Medicaid program.

"This will help a whole lot of people who might be making those extraordinary choices" between buying medicine and paying the rent, said the governor, who has named the program Silver Saver.

Other states have received similar waivers, but never with such fortuitous timing. When asked if the announcement was intended to obscure news of the Senate vote, Medicare officials declined to comment.

The party line

Every Thursday at 3 p.m., there is a conference call between the president's advisers at the White House and the governor's advisers in Tallahassee.

Presiding on the Washington end is Nicole Devonish, a media adviser who previously worked for Gov. Bush. Kathleen Shanahan, the governor's chief of staff and former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, heads up the team on the Tallahassee end of the line.

Shanahan said the calls, which normally last from 5 to 30 minutes, are "very productive from the sense of shared information."

In these conference calls preceding the president's visit to Daytona Beach Thursday, Devonish said, the combined staffs decided that the main event should focus on education and planned accordingly.

Education is the president's favorite topic for his visits to Florida. He was sitting in a school classroom in Sarasota on Sept. 11, 2001, when he received word of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

In their public encounters, the Bush brothers usually declare their affection for each other and joke about their relationship and their mother, who is portrayed as a strict disciplinarian.

"Obviously, we were raised right," the president told a Jacksonville audience last year, "because Jeb's priority and my priority are the same -- to make sure every child gets a good education in America."

In the past, the conference calls between Washington and Tallahassee also have been helpful in coordinating presidential announcements regarding issues important to Florida, such as offshore oil drilling, citrus canker and pending matters before Congress.

But the regular Thursday conference call is by no means the only contact between the two administrations.

"There are a lot of calls at all levels," Devonish said.

Visits to Florida by the president's cabinet officers have been too numerous to count, and many of the appointees are reluctant to even talk about it.

HUD Secretary Mel Martinez, a Floridian who appears to visit more than any other cabinet officer, said he would give the Times a list of his trips to the state only if the newspaper filed a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act, which often takes years to yield results.

Democrats offered a copy of the governor's schedule for Feb. 15 that they said is indicative of his frequent contacts with the Bush cabinet. Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, stopped by at 9 a.m. Tom Ridge, the president's homeland security adviser, followed at 9:30 a.m. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham showed up at 1:45 p.m.

Ridge, who at the time was developing the nation's terrorism-response program, offered high praise for the governor's disaster preparedness plans. "There's a lot going on in the 50 states," he said, "but I like what's going on here."

Administration officials downplay the political importance of these visits to Florida. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer portrays the Florida governor as just one of many Republican candidates the president is trying to help.

"I think the president looks forward to helping people across the country ... who believe in an agenda that he believes in," Fleischer said. "And, of course, the Republican governor of Florida, his brother, believes in the similar agenda. ... The president is confident in the outcome of the election there."

A 'new paradigm'

Jeb Bush , who is locked in a close race with Democrat Bill McBride , has been grateful for his brother's help.

"We've been real pleased with how Washington is responding to our homeland defense needs," he said in an interview.

But he rejects any suggestion that the president is spending taxpayer money simply to help him win re-election. In a letter to the editor of the New Republic, he said Florida has reaped the benefits of "a new paradigm in governing" at the White House.

And Jeb takes some credit for helping the president to develop the new paradigm. In January 2001, he wrote a nine-page letter urging his brother to give states more freedom.

"State governments are the seedbeds of innovation and experiment, not the docile wards of a bureaucracy far from home," he wrote. "... Given the freedom to act, they can portend the success or failure of public policy at the federal level, and among other states."

The letter summed up several years of serious discussions between the two bothers about the nature of the relationship between the federal and state governments. It was written in Jeb's well-known wonkish vocabulary.

Insiders say the letter reflects the type of advice he often provides the president. In one way or another, according to the governor's aides, the White House tried to implement almost all of the 12 suggestions Jeb made in his letter.

Some of the requests the governor made in his letter, such as the waivers of federal rules governing Medicare and education, had been either deferred or rejected by the Clinton administration.

"We weren't punished under Clinton, but no one went out of their way to help," Jeb Bush said. "We normally heard about new programs or initiatives in the newspapers or on television."

He said Bush administration officials respond more quickly to his requests, as they did after the recent death of a Marine from Tampa who was stationed in Kuwait.

"I got an e-mail from his mom, who was concerned his twin brother was overseas; she wanted to know if he could be relocated," Jeb Bush explained.

The governor's top aide, Shanahan, placed a few calls to Washington. The Defense Department agreed to expedite the return of the victim's brother from Okinawa, where he was stationed. Gov. Bush called the boy's mother with the good news on the day before her slain son was buried.

Sibling rivalry

"We've always been pretty close," says Jeb, referring to the president, his older brother. But there are others in the Bush family who tell a different story.

Pamela Kilian, author of Barbara Bush, Matriarch of a Dynasty, says she was told by several family members that the seven-year age difference between the brothers prevented them from having a genuinely close relationship as children or as young adults.

"When they were little, Jeb, Neil and Marvin were close together in age, and George was the big brother who went away to prep school," Killian said. "I don't think they were close. ... They fought a lot."

In later years, according to another biographer, Bill Minutaglio, author of First Son, there was tension between the two because George resented his parents' view of Jeb as the child most likely to carry on the family's political tradition.

Even in recent years, whenever the president has tried to joke about their relationship, he often insists he is smarter than Jeb. Minutaglio sees this as a sign that he has never gotten over being portrayed as the dumb brother.

"He wears his emotions on his sleeve," the author says.

Jeb's reputation as the smart one was fostered primarily by his passionate interest in public policy, which was evident long before he ever ran for public office.

Several former Bush aides recall that both brothers were summoned to Camp David in 1987 to help plan their father's presidential election strategy. "Jeb wanted to talk about issues," said one, "but George kept asking, "When are we going to go skeet shooting?"'

As politicians, the Bush brothers have tried similar policies and told the same jokes on the stump. Together, they forged a more conservative philosophy than their father's. Jeb says he talks by telephone with his brother about every two weeks, and sees him far more often now than before George was elected president.

Kohut said the governor's race is important for his brother, both symbolically and practically.

"On a symbolic level," says Kohut, "the president needs to have his brother re-elected to show he is just as strong, or stronger than he was in 2000. He needs to combat those in the Democratic Party who say, "Let's throw the president off base by defeating his brother; let's show how the Bushes are vulnerable."'

In addition, Kohut said, the president will no doubt need Florida's electoral votes to win re-election in 2004. It will be harder to do that if his brother no longer controls the dominant, statewide political organization.

"Florida is where the election ended in 2000," Kohut said, "and it's going to be where the election starts in 2004."

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