Who is Jeb’s wife, what effect will she have on his campaign—and what effect will his campaign have on their marriage?
The role of political spouse always entails sacrifice, but Columba’s case has been extreme. Jeb’s time in office coincided with stretches when Columba was reportedly unhappy, because of his absence or because of troubles with one of their three children or because she herself had landed in the news in ways that mortified her. It was during Jeb Bush’s governing years that Columba let it slip to the press how her husband’s career had damaged their children, and that she reportedly told Jeb he had ruined her life. During his governorship, which ran from 1999 to 2007, she often retreated to Miami while he was living in Tallahassee.
All of which makes you wonder what it will be like for her to live through a national campaign and possibly a presidency, during which the mode she’s enjoyed least will become her entire existence. In the Jackie Kennedy years, she might have gotten away with a smile, a few supporting speeches, and an appropriate cause or two. (One of the rare YouTube videos of Columba shows her giving a Jackie-like tour of her house to a Spanish-speaking TV anchor.) But feminist resistance to the idea of wife as silent prop has in some ways put more pressure on a first lady to be serious and weighty and comfortable in front of the camera, giving someone like Columba no easy place to hide.
To Jeb’s friends, it looked like meeting Columba allowed Jeb to settle into who he actually was. Before that Mexico trip, Jeb had been known in school as a good tennis player,
an indifferent student, a bit of a bully, and a toker, a guy whose room you could go to in order to get high. “I was a cynical little turd at a cynical school,” he once said.
After he graduated college
with a degree in Latin American studies, he and Columba moved to Venezuela, where he became a vice president of the Texas Commerce Bank. The couple spoke Spanish at home; their eldest son’s first words were agua, jugo, and aquí (“water,” “juice,” and “here”). In 1979, when Jeb’s father began creating a presidential-campaign network, Jeb and his family moved to Miami to help him out. Miami turned out to be perfect both for the family and for Jeb’s ambitions. The Republican Party there was growing, thanks to Cubans who admired President Reagan and Vice President Bush’s anti-Castro policies. Jeb ran for chairman of Dade County’s Republican Party and won—the first political win for his generation of Bushes.
Perhaps, if Jeb becomes president, Columba will get away with a few practiced public speeches and some behind-the-scenes charity work. (She did give a nominating speech in Spanish in 1988 for her father-in-law at the convention in New Orleans.) Perhaps she will get away with letting her sons do the bulk of the talking for the family. Maybe the most interesting thing she could do is create a new model, whereby the first lady does not have to give up being a private citizen merely because her husband is elected president.
Not likely, though. In March, Laura Bush, George W.’s wife, assured voters that Columba will “be great,” telling CNN that she, too, was shy when her husband entered national politics, but got over it. That was partly thanks to a carefully coordinated media strategy to help make Laura comfortable, letting her “practice” first with local print and TV reporters. By the time 9/11 happened, she was ready for the national and international media. “She became the comforter in chief,” recalls Noelia Rodriguez, who was her press secretary at the time. “We just knew it would be very difficult to remain private, because who lives in a private world anymore? Everyone always knows what you’re doing.”
Any decent campaign would package Columba’s immigrant journey as an American triumph, a rags-to-riches fairy tale like the version in Parga’s book. But in my experience, immigrant journeys—even the successful ones—are never that straightforward. Like most immigrants, Columba is pulled between relatives in León who claim she forgot them when she acclimated and relatives in America who want to swallow her whole.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/the-mysterious-columba-bush/392090/
