Bush: the next generation - Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Jed Bush - On the Scene

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Rich Lowry

About two hundred members of the Florida Association of Realtors interrupt Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush to cheer his call for abolishing the state's Department of Education. They burst into applause again when he suggests handing more power back to local governments. They laugh at his prediction that the "excuse-me-for-living tax" will be the next one imposed by Governor Lawton Chiles. Jeb, as everyone calls him, is on a roll.

"If we are to ensure a brighter future for our children, we need to draw a line in the sand," Bush tells the crowd. "I'm not kidding when I say that government's power needs to be controlled. It's not just empty political rhetoric. I think we're in decline if we don't. I'm not kidding that government should prioritize its spending. I believe that public safety is the first priority. The demands that we create by our welfare system, which is morally wrong and economically unsustainable, will never allow us to have limited government. So we have to dismantle the welfare state, and I'm convinced ..."

The end of the sentence is drowned out by more cheers. Forget kinder and gentler. This is Bush: The Next Generation. Asked at one debate what specifically he'd do as governor to help blacks, he replied. "Probably nothing." It wasn't a gaffe. "I think," Bush explains, "we need to have public policy with an edge to it."

Bush has the honest looks of his father and the same gracious manner, but politically he's a departure. George Bush exemplified a Republicanism of accommodation; Jeb exhibits a no-apologies conservatism. The elder Bush spent thirty years in public life; the son, a 41-year-old businessman making his first run for elected office, dumps on career politicians. George Bush's directionless Presidency paved the way for the "New Democrats"; Jeb Bush's sharp campaign could help roll them back.

It's not such a stretch to think of the Chiles administration as the Florida chapter of the Clinton Presidency. In 1990 Chiles beat Republican Governor Bob Martinez, a moderate who never recovered from a tax increase he tried desperately to disown. (Sound familiar?) Chiles, meanwhile, drew on an enormous reservoir of good win in the state; he's still known as Walkin' Lawton for campaigning on foot during his successful 1970 Senate bid. With high-powered Democratic consultant Frank Greer (soon to be a Clinton advisor) in his employ, Chiles talked of a "new covenant" and of "reinventing government."

But after pushing unsuccessfully for a $2.5-billion tax increase in 1992, and after a highly publicized series of murders of foreign tourists, Governor Chiles has dropped reinventing government. He is too busy trying to hold back a wave of public revulsion with the status quo. Like George Bush in 1992, Chiles sits atop a restless electorate - 50 per cent of whom think the state is on the wrong track - and confronts a challenger with a more vigorous, youthful image. Like Bill Clinton today, his record hasn't always squared with his New Democrat rhetoric. Like both, he could get punished at the polls.

A key part of the Chiles survival strategy will be putting as conservative a spin on his accomplishments as possible. In New Jersey and Virginia last year Democrats tried to hold onto governorships with similar right-leaning reclamation efforts - only to lose to Republicans who staked out positions so conservative that the Democrats couldn't match them. Jeb Bush could have been taking notes.

Philosophical contrast is his favored weapon. In the September 8 Republican primary two more moderate candidates emerged as his chief opposition. One Bush TV ad featured pictures of the two and Governor Chiles, with a narrator declaiming that three candidates for governor support new taxes, public financing of campaigns, etc., but one doesn't: Jeb Bush. He won an unexpected 46 per cent plurality, just short of what he needed to avoid a runoff but enough to convince runner-up Jim Smith, a former Democrat, to bow out.

"Jeb Bush more than just captured the nomination, he also quickly and really dramatically redefined what the party is like in Florida," says University of Florida political scientist Richard Scher. "Before, it had been seen as negative and me-too." Not any more. Bush craves distinctions between himself and Chiles, and nowhere more than on crime.

Since the tourist murders put crime on top of Florida's agenda, Chiles has created a new agency to handle juvenile offenders and funded more than 20,000 new prison beds. But he's playing catch-up. Governor Martinez funded 24,000 prison beds during his tenure, a construction boom that halted under Chiles. During his first two years in office, Chiles built less than 200. Thanks to a lack of space, prisoners were serving, on average, 33 percent of their sentences. "We begged and pleaded," says Columbia County Sheriff Tom Tramel, a Democrat who is supporting Bush, "but he didn't want to build new space."

Bush is promising to make enough room for every prisoner to serve 85 per cent of his sentence. That means at least another 24,000 new prison beds, estimated to cost roughly $500 million to build and another $400 million annually to operate. How to pay for it? No new taxes. Bush says prisons will just become his top priority: nothing else gets funded until the prisons do. The effect of this commitment in a state where the per-capita tax burden is 42nd in the nation and migrants constantly place new demands on state resources will be to starve the traditional welfare state.