http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/jeb-bush-like-barack-obama-113873_full.html#.VKQH8HuGNOUWould Jeb Be Like Barack?
His emails portray a leader who's insular, introverted—and not afraid of executive power.
By S.V. DÁTE
December 30, 2014
An executive branch led by an insular, almost brooding intellect … running a tightly controlled, top-down policy machine with an aversion for leaks … and a mistrust—even disdain—for the legislative branch.
The Obama White House? Perhaps—but as fresh scrutiny of tens of thousands of his emails is starting to show, it could just as easily describe one of the current president’s would-be successors, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
In his two terms in Tallahassee, the Republican governor pushed the boundaries of executive power. He unilaterally restructured the state’s affirmative action program through an executive order, rankling the state’s black community. He used his line-item veto pen liberally, axing hundreds of millions of dollars in hometown projects and upsetting even the state’s Republican Senate to the point that it successfully sued him on a technical point.
In contrast to previous Florida administrations, both Democratic and Republican, Bush pulled decision-making authority for his agencies inward to a small circle of staff in the governor’s office. Even media inquiries: All but the most routine similarly needed governor’s office sign-off.
And while Bush’s approach earned the irritation of many in the state’s 160-member legislature who thought it heavy-handed, the bad feelings were mutual. In the final days of Bush’s tenure, an academic researcher asked him how closely Florida lawmakers paid attention to the state’s critical issues. Bush responded: “Ignorance is bliss and being ignorant makes it easier to avoid explaining the tough decision back home.”
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Bush caught the political world off guard earlier this month when he announced he would “actively explore” a presidential run (if partly because no one was really sure what that phrase meant—and how it differed from what he’d been doing before). Since then, though, his steps have become more clear—he has started pulling back from his corporate entanglements—and a new poll shows him taking a lead in the early 2016 primary field. All of this follows his announcement that he would release an e-book and a quarter-million emails from his gubernatorial years.
Bush was an early and prolific adopter of email—his official state of Florida portrait features his ubiquitous BlackBerry in its charging cradle—and he called his decision a matter of “transparency,” of putting all the information out there and letting Americans draw their own conclusions. Another explanation might be found in the 42-word warning at the bottom of many of those emails:
“Please note: Florida has a very broad public records law. Most written communications to or from state officials regarding state business are public records available to the public and media upon request. Your e-mail communications may therefore be subject to public disclosure."
In other words, Bush really had no choice. All of his emails pertaining to state business, both from his official governor’s office account and his personal account, are public records and have been open to inspection under Florida law from the moment they were created. Many news organizations went ahead and requested them from the State Archives of Florida, as did the liberal opposition research group American Bridge, which has posted them all online.
And while it’s true that Bush was “digital before digital was cool,” it’s also true that Florida governor was his first elective office, and he had little preparation for the reach and breadth of the state’s open records statute. It took the preparation of a lawsuit by media organizations for him to turn over transition team records. He had argued they shouldn’t be considered public records because, even though he was using state office space and staff, he had not yet been sworn in.
Once his administration began and he and his staff realized how their internal email discussions were playing out in press accounts, they largely stopped using email (or at least email from known accounts) for what they considered to be sensitive topics. At one point late in his first year, Bush even chided his staff to take elsewhere their debate about how much vacation time they received: “I suggest that you guys have a verbal conversation about it rather than create a public document. : )”
By the second term, they had it down to a science. In October 2006, Bush’s general counsel, Raquel Rodriguez, emailed him: “Too late to change what I called you about.” Bush replied nine minutes later: “Gotya.”
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Yet even accounting for self-censorship, Bush’s emails make for fascinating reading and reveal his level of interest in and knowledge of any number of issues crossing his desk every day. Something that’s harder to glean from the collected notes is his comfort level, perhaps even preference, for human interaction via computer rather than in person. This may shock those who’ve made assumptions based on the frat-boy swagger and exaggerated extroversion of his elder brother, former president George W. Bush.
When Jeb Bush’s first social services secretary cajoled him into taking a personality test, the “introvert” diagnosis surprised some among his staff—but not those who knew him for any length of time. In fact, Bush described himself as “antisocial” in a 1988 interview with Women’s Wear Daily, and blamed it on his mother. “I learned that from her. She dislikes phony formalities.”
This came across pretty clearly during his time as governor. At social events, Bush would often avoid the big-money donors to the Republican Party and instead engage with parents of disabled children he had met on the campaign trail or with the children of staff. When he played golf, he played hard, with little chit-chat and at a tempo that suggested he had other, more important things to do. When he watched sports on television, more often than not it was with an open laptop rather than a group of friends.
What Bush clearly did enjoy was being governor. From the big-picture goals of cutting the size of government and increasing student test scores, to the small-bore details of rulemaking at the Department of Education and conservation easement wording at the Department of Environmental Protection, Bush was in it up to his elbows—even to the point of signing off on the placement of low-level staff.
In his second term, for instance, a graphics design employee in the Department of Education was considering a position at a community college, and one of Bush’s deputy chiefs of staff was seeking his approval. “Fred has been approached about his interest—and is very interested. He would get to travel more,” she wrote.
Late in the second term, when he learned his social services secretary had attended a mental health event, he pinged another deputy: “Did you know that lucy hadi went to the mental health advocacy press conference?”
Critics wondered what the point of all those department heads was if seemingly everything, big and small, was to be decided in the Capitol building’s Plaza Level.
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Still, to a national audience learning about him for the first time, the emails paint a portrait long known to Florida journalists and political observers of a relentless and hard-working chief executive. He was up before the sun and worked late into the night, poring over briefing books he’d taken home with him to the Governor’s Mansion and, for hours each day, reading and replying to correspondence.
Those emails also show his willingness to engage not just with staff and lobbyists, but with the public at large. He routed clemency requests to his staff, passed along various and sundry complaints to the appropriate agencies, wrote his own thank you notes.
When a flare-up with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela raised the question of why the Florida Turnpike had a contract with Venezuelan-owned Citgo gas, a former Citgo distributor sent Bush an email offering her thoughts. A half-hour later, Bush emailed back: “Calling you right now.”
Sometimes, his pique got the better of him. A few months before Bush’s reelection in 2002, a “proud Democrat” emailed him to say that he hated Bush’s education policies and would work to “boot” him from office come November. Bush fired back: “Give it your best shot,” and, “Have a wonderful day.”
Nevertheless, it was clear from both word and deed that Bush was loving every minute of his time as governor. (And thanks to a gift from a second term Cabinet secretary, he was able to keep track of exactly how many of those minutes he had left. It was a digital countdown timer, set for noon on January 2, 2007, when he would have to step down because of term limits. Bush kept it on the desk in the small workspace adjacent to his larger formal office.)
In fact, the email record shows, Bush actually kept working, clearing though his inbox, even after the noon hour had passed and he was no longer governor. Finally, at 2:10 p.m., Bush forwarded a request from a Clay County man looking for help with his prison guard son’s retirement plan to the Department of Corrections and the Department of Management Services.
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As important as all those emails are to understand Bush, there’s an equally important clue tucked in that same official portrait that depicts his much-vaunted BlackBerry. It’s on the shelf beneath the device—a slim tract from the previous turn of the century titled A Message to Garcia.
It’s an essay about an American Army officer dispatched by President William McKinley on the eve of the Spanish-American War to find a Cuban rebel leader and deliver him an offer of an alliance. Author Elbert Hubbard waxes poetic about Lt. Andrew Rowan’s ability to take a simple order and simply carry it out. No requests for additional details, no complaints about its difficulty, no begging for more time. Rowan did was he was told to do, with neither hand-holding nor drama.
For Bush, this was inspired genius. From the day he took the oath, all top staff were given a copy of that book, often with an inscription from Bush to “be a messenger.”
In the event people signing on to work in Bush’s office were hazy on how things worked, A Message to Garcia made it all perfectly clear: They were not being hired to ask a lot of questions. Bush and a small cadre of advisers already had the ideas—the “Big Hairy Audacious Goals,” the BHAGs, as they called them. Everybody else’s job was to get them done.
And that everybody included Bush’s running mate and lieutenant governor, Frank Brogan. As a former teacher, school administrator and, for the four years prior to Bush’s election, the state’s elected education commissioner, Brogan was assigned the task of drafting Bush’s school reform plan. Brogan, as was his wont, solicited input from across the board, including teachers and school administrators, to come up with his proposal.
But a consensus approach was not what Bush had in mind. Brogan’s plan was torn up as insufficiently punitive to poorly performing schools and thereby failing to generate a sufficient number of private school vouchers. The task was turned over to the husband of Bush’s chief of staff, and it was that version that was introduced in the legislature and ultimately became law.
Others who could not get with the Bush program were shifted into different jobs or encouraged to leave (sometimes: encouraged very strongly) but nothing so dramatic happened with Brogan, who in that first year was also coping with his wife’s final stages of breast cancer and eventual death.
He served out the first term, continuing his role as Bush’s softer, kinder, more self-deprecating public face. But when an opportunity came to run Florida Atlantic University after the 2002 reelection, Brogan jumped at it.
No one in Tallahassee was really surprised.
