Behind the suits

Jeb Bush is known for his attention to details, decisivness and working 16-hour days, but he doesn't like criticism or to hear the word "no.''

By STEVE BOUSQUET, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 3, 2002

[Times photo: Cherie Diez]

TALLAHASSEE -- He's the governor of the nation's fourth-largest state, enamored of big, bold ideas and unafraid of change, even if it angers people.

He's also a backseat driver.

Gov. Jeb Bush can be headed somewhere on state business, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent at the wheel, and he'll suggest a shorter route, barely looking up from his laptop as he cruises along in the front passenger seat (he hates the back).

"He'll be typing and he'll say, "Why don't you go over the causeway?' " said Cory Tilley, a former deputy chief of staff. "That's how detail oriented the guy can be."

Early one morning last week, Bush arrived at the Tallahassee airport to find a blanket of fog. A jet scheduled to fly him to St. Petersburg to campaign with Arizona Sen. John McCain couldn't land. Bush, pacing around a small lobby at 7 a.m., was ticked off that his people didn't arrange for the jet to be there the night before. In foggy conditions, planes often can take off but not land.

"This is North Florida," Bush admonished a half-awake aide.

For Jeb Bush , the micromanager governor, no task is too big or too small. He knows where he wants to go, and how he wants to get there -- fast.

His certitude is why so many people admire him and others detest him.

Four years ago, John Ellis Bush took the oath as Florida's 43rd governor, openly disdainful of the capital's we-know-best culture of arrogance. "Mount Tallahassee," he calls it. Soon afterward, the state Senate sued him for vetoing part of the budget. The Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Bush had defied the state Constitution.

Critics said Bush simply substituted his own arrogance for what came before. They said major decisions suffered from a lack of input from people with opposing viewpoints and that those advising him lacked savvy and real-world experience.

"He could have done a better job putting people in place that had the experience and leadership skills themselves, and the courage, perhaps, to tell him when he's not doing something that's exactly right," said Comptroller Bob Milligan, a fellow Republican.

Bush, 49, surrounded himself with young, bright, hard-working, politically naive people, many with no familiarity with state government and no relationships with people in the other two branches. But they shared his conservative philosophy and his appetite for 16-hour days.

Bush's workaholic pace and willingness to take on political sacred cows have rewritten the job description of governor. He calls it "the best job in the world." To those who work for him, it can be the toughest job in the world.

This is a governor who arrives at staff meetings with page after page of lists. They include matters great and small, from policy changes in the state prison system to a question about medication being given to a wayward juvenile in state custody.

"It's a tough job," Bush said recently while flying between campaign stops in a chartered Cessna, multitasking as always, reading e-mails on his hand-held Blackberry while answering a reporter's questions. "Nothing passive going on around me."

Bush's brother, President Bush, is the clean-desktop type who delegates. Bush's predecessor, the late Lawton Chiles, would disappear for days at a time with his hunting and fishing pals.

Not Bush. One week every summer at his family's compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, and an occasional golfing vacation or long weekend are enough for him.

Aides joke that they can't wait for Bush to get back from Maine because he sends even more e-mail than he does when he's working.

Bush, a convert to Catholicism, often attends Saturday evening Mass and devotes Sunday mornings to golf at the private Capital City Country Club.

Former House Speaker John Thrasher, an occasional Bush golfing partner, says the governor has an 11 or 12 handicap and would be better if he would slow down. "He gets relaxed a little bit, and he takes it seriously," Thrasher said. "He likes to hit good shots, he plays fairly rapidly. He doesn't like to meander."

Bush dislikes hotels and prefers to arrange travel so he's back at the Governor's Mansion by nightfall. When he has to travel for the campaign, he likes having his wife, Columba, with him to keep his dark side in check.

"The intense Jeb comes out less when my wife is with me. It's comforting to have her here with me. She's more reserved. She's normal. This is not normal," he said Saturday, referring to traveling in a giant tour bus with a huge entourage of supporters, staff and news media.

Back in the Capitol, he keeps two desks, bare-topped mahogany in the formal governor's office for bill signings and a smaller version in a side office, cluttered with papers and two laptop computers.

He spends much of his office time there, his 6-foot-4 frame hunched over a laptop, scrolling through page after page of e-mails, his black reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

"He'll call you into his office, and it will be a detail question," said Mike Hansen, who worked for Bush as a human services budget specialist. "It won't be a big picture. It will be, "What did we do here?' This guy works all the time. This is his life."

Bush's former deputy general counsel, Reg Brown, prepared Bush on clemency matters -- convicted felons seeking early release from prison or a restoration of civil rights. Bush asked questions that showed he really had read the backup material.

"If you gave Jeb a memo, he would read it," Brown said. "That was really refreshing."

Bush has held office hours in out-of-the-way towns where governors rarely go. One visit led to a now-famous campaign ad about Bush getting a traffic light installed in front of a new elementary school. The message is clear: Nothing's too small for this governor.

He holds leadership seminars for top staffers and agency heads. Bush chooses the speakers, ranging from Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure who operates a prison outreach ministry, to Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

Newspaper readers around the state are accustomed to seeing letters to the editor signed "Jeb Bush , governor of Florida," taking issue with an article or editorial he thought was wrong.

He likes having the last word.

Some Bush staff members found the atmosphere in the governor's office stifling.

Ruth Sykes, a highly touted "efficiency czar," quit in May 2001 after less than six months. After she left, Sykes told the Tallahassee Democrat she could not get Bush's "inner circle" to consider alternatives to a Bush initiative that eliminated civil service protections for 16,000 state workers.

"You feel like you can't voice your opinion and be critical," Sykes said at the time.

"It was rumored that he wouldn't let you tell him the truth. He didn't want to hear any failures. Go, go, go. Fast, fast," says Mary Dozier, a former high-level staffer in Bush's State Technology Office who was forced out after policy differences with her boss.

But nearly a dozen current and former staffers say Bush encourages vigorous debate.

Justin Sayfie, who served Bush as a policy and press aide, recalls attending staff meetings where Bush went one by one around the room, practically goading his young idealists to show the courage of their convictions.

"He would go around the room and just ask, "Sign or veto? Take a stand,' " Sayfie said. "Decisiveness is a trait the governor has and it's a trait he appreciates in others."

Lobbyist and former Republican state Sen. Ken Plante, one of the few people older than Bush who has advised him, said he marveled at Bush's ability to absorb information.

"There's a perception out there that it's the governor's way or the highway, and I can tell you, there were young people in there and he said, "What do you think?' And they would look at me as if to say "What do I do?' " Plante said. "He wants to know."

Plante was brought in partly to smooth Bush's relationships with legislators, many of whom resented Bush for rejecting the time-honored practice of larding the state budget with questionable hometown projects.

"He said he would be different, and he has been different," said former deputy chief of staff Cory Tilley. "I think he's more reflective of the new, modern Florida than previous governors have been."

Bush moves quickly and decisively, never showing self-doubt. A brainstorm can morph into a decision quickly, sometimes with embarrassing results.

The example cited most often is Bush's One Florida initiative ending affirmative action in college admissions and state contacting, sprung on an unsuspecting public in October 1999. It enraged many African-Americans and led to huge, angry protests in Tallahassee, the biggest since the civil rights era of the 1960s.

Bush was commerce secretary under Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, whose biggest blunder was embracing a services tax and then leading the effort to repeal the tax after just a few months in 1987. As controversial as the tax was, it was the governor's flip-flop on the issue that helped make him a one-term governor.

Intent on being the first Republican governor elected to a second term, Bush appears to have learned from that experience. He did not back down from his One Florida initiative, and now boasts of its effectiveness.

Bush also didn't cave in to intense criticism of his new child welfare secretary.

Bush fired his hand-picked head of the Department of Children and Families this summer and hurriedly recruited Jerry Regier from Oklahoma City to replace her. But he was quickly embroiled in controversy after a database search failed to turn up controversial writings about spanking children and women working outside the home. Bush's office spent weeks trying to control the damage.

Despite calls to dump Regier, Bush stuck with him. Now, the controversy has receded and Regier is getting high marks for his work.

Bush has followed his father's advice for leadership: "Stay the course."

Still, he questioned the motives of Regier's critics, telling a friend in an e-mail: "I am no longer amazed at the anti-Christian feelings in the press."

For public consumption, Bush appears not to care about the harsh words written about him. The reality is a little different. After six months in office, Bush noticed that the Orlando Sentinel was highly critical of him on its editorial page.

"We are getting pounded by the Sentinel. Two to three times a week it seems. I wonder why?" he wrote to chief of staff Sally Bradshaw.

Returning from a 1999 education speech in Naples, Bush told his top aides to let him know in the future if a reporter is present. "This is just a friendly reminder to check if there are reporters at events. I was more forthright than I would have been had I known. Thanks team."

That admonition wasn't followed recently, leading to Bush's worst misstep of the campaign.

Unaware that a reporter for Gannett News Service followed several Pensacola-area House members and candidates into his office, Bush referred to "juicy details" about the sexual orientations of the women who provided care to Rilya Wilson, the Miami girl who had been in state care and is still missing. He said he had "a couple of devious plans" to deal with a voter initiative on smaller class sizes that he opposes.

Bush eventually said he regretted the remarks, but his initial reaction was strained and defensive. Bush's impatience can flash at the slightest provocation.

The New York Times last week observed a testy Bush telling a voter tugging on his sleeve to wait a minute. "Do you know what a second is? A second is . . ." He stopped mid-sentence.

Two weeks ago, CNN's Judy Woodruff asked Bush a long winded-question that repeated a political charge by Bill McBride . Bush interrupted her: "And the question is, Judy?"

Bush has an electronic network of people who keep him informed on myriad subjects, or who remind him of bureaucratic missions unfulfilled.

He uses e-mail as an instrument to prod complacent bureaucrats into helping constituents.

"He's connected to thousands of people all across this state via e-mail," Sayfie said. "If there's a hiccup somewhere in this state, it's on his radar screen."

Bush used an anguished cry for help from the mother of an abused child to emphasize to his staff the importance of electronic communication.

"This is why it is important that we respond to the hundreds of e-mails. There are real people with real pain, needing real attention," Bush wrote. "Some we can satisfy, some we can't."

Sometimes, he works quietly behind the scenes.

Rabbi Bruce Warshal of Hillsboro Beach said he asked Bush to write a letter and make phone calls urging the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club in Boca Raton to accept Jews and blacks as members. The club, a Palm Beach County institution, reached an agreement in March with the state attorney general to change its membership policy.

Warshal, a Democrat, publishes the Jewish Journal, a paper that editorially supported Bush in 1998 and again this year. He said Democratic politicians wouldn't aggressively challenge the club, but Bush wrote a letter in 2000 urging the organization to diversify its membership.

"When a governor calls up and says "Are you discriminating?' it has an effect," Warshal said. "You can say anything you want about Jeb, good, bad or indifferent, but when it comes to discrimination, he's a real liberal. He hates discrimination."

The story remained in the background until recently, when Bush highlighted it in a campaign mailing targeted mainly to Jewish voters.

Two things are striking about many members of the Bush inner circle: their loyalty and their short tenure. Gone are Bradshaw, Brown, Sayfie, Plante, Tilley, former general counsel Carol Licko and legislative affairs director Hayden Dempsey.

Most left to make more money in the private sector or to spend more time with their young children.

Expect more staff changes if Bush is re-elected, but the fast pace will continue. Bush is just getting warmed up.

He wants to emphasize reading more than any other issue, focusing on third-graders. He wants to find money to build more classrooms and has talked privately of challenging the traditional approach to teacher pay, setting up a confrontation with local unions.

And a bunch of schools need traffic lights.

-- Times researchers Caryn Baird and Deirdre Morrow contributed to this report.

The portraits

They posed themselves.

The portraits of Jeb Bush and Bill McBride on the front page were made on different days and in different locations. St. Petersburg Times photographer Cherie Diez photographed Bush in the newspaper's St. Petersburg studio on Oct. 17, just before he met with the newspaper's editorial writers. She photographed McBride in a hotel room in Ybor City just after he spoke at a rally on Oct. 29.

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