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Bush's legacy Part 1: The office

Early edition: The office of governor is more powerful today then ever, thanks to Bush’s iron will, a compliant Legislature and willing voters who expanded the authority of the state’s chief executive.

By STEVE Bousquet
Published December 28, 2006

People in Florida had never seen a leader like Jeb Bush, and they are not likely to see one like him again. The first Republican governor to win reelection in Florida history will leave office Tuesday.   

During his eight-year tenure, he rewrote the job description of governor and raised expectations of how elected officials should lead, especially in times of crisis.

John Ellis Bush governed the nation’s fourth-largest state with a determination that leaves behind two contrasting images: the principled leader guided by his own inner compass and the hard-headed ideologue indifferent to opposing views.

To syndicated columnist Fred Barnes, Bush was “the best governor in America.”

To Sen. Frederica Wilson, a Miami Democrat, he was an arrogant monarch: “King Jeb,” she called him.

Bush steered Florida through eight hurricanes, the most contentious presidential election in U.S. history, the creation and dismantling by the courts of a school voucher program, a sustained real estate and employment boom, record tax cuts, revamping of Medicaid, restoration of the Everglades, a highly emotional fight over the death of Terri Schiavo and the dawn of a post-9/11 world.

He leaves behind an office that has been transformed, invested with more power, both politically and structurally, than it has ever had.

“He’ll go down as one of the most consequential governors in Florida history,” said political scientist Aubrey Jewett at the University of Central Florida. “He was a strong leader, he had a vision for the state, and he had big ideas that he articulated to the public and to the Legislature.”

***

At 6-feet-4, Bush towered over the Florida political scene, both literally and figuratively. The son of a past president and the brother of the sitting president, he brought a sense of dynastic royalty to the office.

Across a wide policy arc, Bush also brought a sense of mission to his work that had not been in evidence since Democrat Reubin Askew’s two terms in the 1970s.

“I think people would say that we’re doing things,” Bush said of his record. “They may not agree with everything we’re doing, but there’s stuff being done. I think people like that. They like government to be focused on their issues, and activist.”

A string of high-profile controversies, and his tendency to appear high-handed in his activist governing style, made him the most marched-on governor in the state’s history. But he departs with his popularity intact: Nearly six of 10 Floridians rated Bush as a “good” or “great” governor in one recent poll.

“If I had a horrible grade, the joy of this time in service would be no different,” Bush said. “It’s a nice validation, but it’s not the motivation of service.”

Bush didn’t redraw the job of governor by himself. His iron will and natural boldness meshed fortuitously with good timing and good luck.

He entered office in 1999, soon after Republicans gained control of both houses of the Legislature, and just as the first effects of term limits were being felt.

Term limits largely emptied Tallahassee of seasoned lawmakers, many of whom saw themselves as equals of the governor. They were replaced by less experienced politicians, mostly Republicans who gladly deferred to Bush.

Voters also downsized the Cabinet from six elected members to three, combining two offices into one, and eliminating statewide officeholders of secretary of state and education commissioner. Both became appointees of the governor.

The Legislature went further by abolishing the Board of Regents for higher education and replacing it with boards of trustees at all 11 state universities, who are appointed by the governor.

The Legislature revamped the judicial selection system by eliminating the Florida Bar’s power to appoint members to 26 judicial nominating panels. Those picks became the governor’s.
Bush appointed more than 250 judges during his eight years in office.

***

State Rep. Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach Democrat, said that through sheer persistence, Bush was able to push through an agenda more conservative than most Floridians.

“His ideas were farther to the right than the people he represented,” Gelber said.

One of the lasting contradictions of Bush’s record is that he cut state taxes by more than $19-billion, far more than any governor in the state’s history, but as he exits, many Floridians feel overwhelmed by the crushing weight of local property taxes.

Bush faults cities and counties for being unwilling to control spending, but local officials say they have been forced to pick up the slack left by Bush and his fellow tax-cutters in Tallahassee, especially on education, where the state’s contribution to local school funding has shrunk.

***

The Jeb Bush legacy is likely to include a redefined sense of what it means to demonstrate effective leadership in a crisis, such as a Category 4 hurricane.

Nature’s wrath challenged Bush to reassure Floridians that better times were ahead. From the state’s emergency operations center in Tallahassee, Bush exuded calm and confidence in the face of multiple-hurricane summers, then flew to the damaged regions to meet with the displaced and to hand out supplies.

For a time during his tenure terrorism, too, posed a grave threat to Florida tourism, a cornerstone of the state’s economic base.

Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, with many Americans fearful of flying on jets, Bush boarded commercial flights to Boston and Chicago in a gesture aimed at restoring confidence in air travel. He also flew from Miami to Tallahassee.

Working as a crisis manager emphasized Bush’s hands-on approach to problems and his ability to inspire others.
But the same CEO-style qualities that served Bush so well in moments of peril abandoned him at other times. He made hiring decisions at some agencies that proved to be disastrous.

His second-term corrections secretary, James Crosby, is likely headed to prison after admitting he took kickbacks from vendors.

The second of three Bush secretaries in the beleaguered Department of Children & Families, Jerry Regier, was forced to quit in 2004 after he and two subordinates accepted favors from contractors or lobbyists in violation of Bush’s ethics policy.

In eight years, Bush appointed six different secretaries at the Department of Management Services, which acts as the state’s landlord and oversees a vast array of outsourcing ventures.

“It’s a never-ending supply of secretaries and directors who had to leave under bad circumstances,” said state Sen. Nancy Argenziano, R-Dunnellon.

***

Bush’s hard-charging style generated mixed results in his dealings with the other two branches of government, the Legislature and the courts.

The most significant defeat of his tenure was handed to Bush by the courts; in 2005 a unanimous state Supreme Court struck down school vouchers as unconstitutional. Two justices who joined in the decision were Bush appointees.

His controversial and fruitless efforts to force a state judge to reconnect Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was seen by many critics as a direct assault on the independence of the judiciary.

In the state capital, Bush repeatedly fought with the moderate state Senate over spending, medical malpractice legislation and school vouchers, a key component of his education agenda.

In 2003, Bush publicly criticized “wandering senators” in his party who disagreed with him on the need to limit a doctor’s liability in medical malpractice cases, but he was forced to compromise with them.

“He’s tough-minded and hard-headed, and he likes to get his way,” said Jim Apthorp, a public policy expert and a Democrat who was Askew’s chief of staff in the 1970’s. “Lawton Chiles was, too. But he didn’t feel required to dominate the scene the way Jeb has.”

Bush was dominating, all right.

He seized the power of the purse from the Legislature, insisting that requests for state dollars be endorsed by agencies under his control.

This was no bureaucratic tweak. It was a fundamental change in the way tax dollars were spent, placing the governor squarely at the center of a process that had long been driven by lawmakers.

“He usurped a good deal of the Legislature’s power,” noted Curt Kiser, a former Republican state legislator from Pinellas County. “He staked that claim out in his first year in office, and he’s done nothing but build on it.”

In 1999, legislators sued Bush, claiming he had no right to veto part of a budget line item. The Florida Supreme Court sided with the Legislature, but that didn’t ease Bush’s appetite for cutting budgets.

Over his eight-year tenure, Bush vetoed more than $2-billion in legislative spending, earning the tag “Veto Corleone” from former House speaker John Thrasher, an ally.

Bush believed in socking away as much money as possible for a rainy day, and will leave office with nearly $8-billion in reserves.

In his last round of budget vetoes last June, Bush axed a record $449-million in spending. The cuts infuriated lawmakers every year, but they never tried to override Bush’s vetoes.

By executive order, he replaced affirmative action with his so-called One Florida initiative in university admissions and state contracts in 1999. The move opened a gaping political wound between Bush and African-Americans on the issue of race, and thousands marched on the state capital in protest.

State contracts with minority-owned businesses have increased dramatically, but the percentage of black students enrolled  at state universities has remained largely unchanged.

***

At a symposium last October honoring the legacy of former Gov. LeRoy Collins, Bush spoke of how he drew inspiration from Collins, whose moderate course on race relations through the 1950s saved Florida from the episodes of disorder that flared in other states.

Early in his first term, Bush quietly ordered the Confederate flag removed from in front of the Florida Capitol and placed in a history museum.

It was his way of sparing Florida a racially divisive flag debate that was already raging in South Carolina and would soon take hold in Georgia.

Bush said Collins’ vision of leadership inspired him. He quoted Collins’ 1957 inaugural address in which he said the duty of a governor is to “navigate the ship of state out of the harbor, but not beyond the horizon, where it can no longer be seen by those on shore.”

Bush said Collins’ words stayed with him.

“I have a tendency of seeing problems and creating five-point plans,” he said. “The people around me tire out quickly, because I try to create a sense of urgency and a sense of purpose. I might have gotten out too far past the port for people to see. To be a leader, you have to have followers.”

On the day Bush took office in 1999, he said in his first inaugural address: “The best and brightest ideas do not come from the state capital, but from the untapped human capital that resides in our diverse communities.”

Yet from that day forward, as he guided Florida into a new millennium, this advocate of limited government was a man of unlimited energy and ideas.

“BHAGs,” Bush called them. “Big, hairy, audacious goals.”

He privatized a vast array of government services, from state workers’ paychecks to meals in prisons.

He eliminated 13,000 state jobs, and during his tenure Florida was a national leader in new job creation. Its unemployment rate was well below the national average.

He created the nation’s first voucher program that allowed students in failing public schools to leave them and enroll in private schools using state money. He also made the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) the engine behind a push to make public schools accountable for the academic standing of its students.

He signed into law the largest rate hike in basic phone service in the state’s history in the name of increased competition for telecommunications.

***

The intense loyalty Bush inspired in others was never more apparent as on a day two weeks ago when he appeared at his final Board of Education meeting. One by one, his appointees took turns lavishing praise on him.

“Wherever you go, if you send for me, I will come,” said T. Willard Fair, who started a charter school in Miami’s Liberty City with Bush’s help and money more than a decade ago. “There is no greater person on the earth than you. I love you.”

In the next stage of his life, Bush is expected to continue having an impact on education policy. He has a well-financed political committee, the Foundation for Florida’s Future Action Fund, but he has not been definitive about his future plans.

“I want to find a way to stay involved in some fashion in public policy that is not intrusive,” Bush said.

Times researchers Angie Drobnic Holan and Deirdre Morrow contributed to this report, and information from The Associated Press was used.

[Last modified December 28, 2006, 20:13:41]