One is Gov. Jeb Bush, who last month offered his dream for state government: "There would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers -- silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill."

Jeb Bush can't escape the shadow of his brother and father. But through a hugely ambitious agenda and willingness to risk his own political capital to accomplish it, he is winning accolades in his own right as one of the nation's most steadfast and cutting-edge conservative governors.

"I use him as the model when I talk to the other governors, to shame them," said Grover Norquist, the influential conservative activist who heads Americans for Tax Reform.

Florida, the centrist megastate Al Gore nearly won, has become a national laboratory for conservative policy: steady tax cuts; sweeping new private school voucher programs; overhauled affirmative action programs; reduced civil service protections for state workers; thousands of state jobs privatized and slashed. Enabling state workers to manage their pension benefits was seen by conservative think tanks and analysts as a bold move akin to privatizing Social Security.

"In terms of what he has already accomplished, Jeb Bush has been out there on the edge," said an admiring Tom Hinton, director of state relations for the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Now it's time to see what he can accomplish in his second, legacy-setting term. His first four years featured some of the best economic times in decades, but that's gone.

Now Bush faces not only a budget crisis, but real pitfalls dealing with Florida's emerging two-party system: moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans.

Democrats are all but obsolete in Tallahassee, where Republicans hold the governor's mansion, every Cabinet seat and outnumber Democrats 26-14 in the state Senate and 81-39 in the state House.

So it's up to Republicans to come to grips with a sputtering economy, a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall, an enormously expensive voter mandate to cut class sizes and a slew of other huge expenses.

The budget pressure is exposing deep fault lines within the party, with fervently antitax Republicans leading the state House and more moderate, pragmatic Republicans leading the Senate.

The moderates look outnumbered.

Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville, balks at Bush's budget cuts. But so far King is unwilling to push for tax increases. At best, he'll settle for slot machines to raise money.

But is the public behind him?

"We ask ourselves sometimes," King said, referring to the Senate moderates, "are we a sign of the future or are we out of step and are we going to become splintered?"

These ideological differences are likely to dominate Florida's political landscape.

The 2004 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, for instance, might pit former U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum, a staunch conservative, against U.S. Rep. Mark Foley of West Palm Beach, who is working hard to debunk his image as a moderate Republican. A likely Republican candidate to succeed Bush in 2006 is Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, widely seen as a leader of the GOP's moderate wing.

Bush is a true-believing conservative whose personality transcends efforts to paint him as an extremist. He campaigns as someone passionate about helping kids read better, determined to reach out to minorities and eager to help the needy.

But he has never confronted the economic challenges Florida now faces. He has even said that next year the state might have no choice but to raise taxes to pay for smaller classes. That kind of talk prompts some lawmakers, including King, to speculate that Bush is angling to ask voters to repeal the class size amendment.

The intraparty rancor already under way in Tallahassee is prompting some lawmakers to speculate about an extended session or a stalemate that threatens a partial shutdown of state government.

The good news for Republicans is that they have little to worry about from Democrats.

"The old saying is that you can't beat somebody with nobody," said lobbyist and former Republican Pinellas legislator Curt Kiser. "Republicans are going to have lots of liberty to do some things that probably wouldn't be very good for them if the Democrats had anybody strong to challenge them."

The bad news for Republicans is that they have to worry about themselves.

How they steer through the stormy next two years has repercussions for President George W. Bush's reelection campaign; longer term, it could determine how long Republicans retain control of the state. "If we're going to tell people that we want less government, less taxes and more personal freedom, and somebody can't put up a credible proposal to fund less government, less taxes, more freedom and take care of the needs of people, then we're gone," said state Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon. "Therein lies the $64,000 question, and it's about leadership and statesmanship."

Yet Bush shows no signs of tempering his enthusiasm for conservative ideas.

While other Republican governors were pushing for higher federal Medicaid reimbursement to the states, Gov. Bush this year successfully lobbied the White House to pursue a sweeping overhaul of the system to give states more control.

While other Republican governors are looking at raising taxes to deal with their bleak state budgets, Bush insists that's the worst approach in a bad economy and wants to resume sales tax holidays and continue rolling back taxes on investments.

The governor has lost some of the unified Republican good will that welcomed him into office in 1999, and he knows that the deeper he gets into his second term the more he becomes a lame duck.

He remains, though, an impatient leader with little interest in playing it safe.

"State governments are the seedbeds of innovation and experiment, not docile wards of bureaucracy far from home," he wrote his older brother in the White House in 2001. "In the sphere of responsibility, they are the high-octane suppliers of change."

The question is whether the door is closing on his ability to push high-octane conservatism.

-- Adam C. Smith can be reached at (727)893-8241 or adam@sptimes.com .

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