Jeb Bush

GEORGE Bush poses with a Cabinet including former Secretary of State George Schultz and other Republican luminaries. Actually, it's not President Bush. It's a son of ex-President Bush. Nor is it a Cabinet. It's an "exploratory committee."The avowed purpose of said panel is to see whether George W. Bush, governor of Texas, should run for the job once held by his father. The unavowed purpose is to make clear that he has Dad's name, Republican friends and list of contributors. Children of nobodies should think twice before running against one whose ascendancy is assured.

NEW ORLEANS -- The hottest brother act in American politics, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and governor-elect Jeb Bush of Florida, made its national debut yesterday at a Republican conference here.Their performance was part vaudeville, part political advance team, part rumination on Republican politics, part Smothers Brothers. They joked about everything but which one Mom liked best.Getting together for the first time in months, the eldest sons of George and Barbara Bush embraced warmly at a closed-door gathering of current and newly elected GOP governors at a New Orleans hotel.

THE dilemma facing Maryland Republicans, indeed, the GOP everywhere, was evident when Ellen Sauerbrey's front-running campaign for governor piggybacked a visit to Baltimore with one by Oliver North this spring. The problem is, how close can a candidate get to the extreme right wing without alienating moderate voters in the party at election time.Asked whether the controversial Mr. North would be invited back to campaign, the Sauerbrey camp was hesitant and noncommittal. Understandably so. But the little toe-dance with the retired colonel, Reagan White House aide and Iran-contra figure illustrates the pickle Republicans are in.The GOP's leading contender in the race for governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, is reckoning with the same issues.

MIAMI -- Jeb Bush had started the day with a breakfast meeting in Ocala, then flown from Orlando back to Miami for a luncheon talk with some businessmen in Hialeah. Ahead is a fund-raiser that will produce about $10,000 for his campaign for governor of Florida.But Bush cancels two other meetings to watch his 17-year-old son, George, a left-handed hitting first baseman, play a high school baseball game. It proves rewarding.Sitting behind home plate with a half-dozen other parents on a soft afternoon, Bush sees young George at his best -- a line drive right at the right fielder, a long home run over the fence in left-center, then a screaming smash up the alley in right center that would have netted him a double when he is thrown out trying to stretch it.It has been a hell of a day for both the grandson and the son of former President George Bush.

BEEVILLE, Texas -- Like most Republicans here, retired oil executive Clark Bissett has long admired former President George Bush, who used to hunt quail in the fields outside this tiny south Texas town.But when Mr. Bush's eldest son, George W., brought his campaign for the Texas governorship to a farm bureau rally here last week, Mr. Bissett assessed him an improvement on the old man. "I find him to be a little more aggressive, a little more outspoken," he said.That description, in fact, fits both George W. Bush and his younger brother Jeb, who last week brushed aside his last challenger for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Florida.

AVENTURA, Fla. -- Talking to an audience of the elderly at the Point East condominium complex here the other day, Gov. Lawton M. Chiles Jr. evoked a round of applause when he told them that when he flew on one of those big 747 jets and the pilot came out of the cockpit, "I feel a lot better if he has a little gray in his hair."This is one of the oldest of old chestnuts in American politics -- the late Hubert H. Humphrey used the identical line to the elderly at a Florida condo in 1972 even though he was using a little brown coloring in his hair to try to appear younger.

Unfortunately for pundits like me, there is no such thing as quality control. We predict things with the most serene condidence and, when proven dead wrong, sail on to the next issue, unchastened and unapologetic.Well, I would like to take a turn eating humble pie about my wrong predictions for this past election. I wrote, nine days before the election, that "the passionate conservatives -- (Rick) Santorum, Jeb Bush, John Kyl and many others will not suffer [Mitt] Romney's fate. Oliver North will win by a comfortable margin -- the quaking of liberal Republicans notwithstanding."

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Miami real estate developer Jeb Bush hTC says he plans to run for governor in 1994 and has already organized a campaign team.The son of former President Bush, a likely favorite early in the race among Florida Republicans, said he plans a formal announcement closer to the primaries. "I have every intention to run, but I want to do it at my own pace," Mr. Bush said.Mr. Bush, 39, isn't alone in his designs on the Republican nomination. State Secretary of State Jim Smith says he will run, state Senate President Ander Crenshaw is considering, and Treasurer Tom Gallagher is seen as a possible contender.

WASHINGTON -- Four years ago, George Bush's son Neil was praised as a "secret weapon" after campaigning for his father in 34 states.But this year he is a Democratic weapon. Tainted by the savings-and-loan scandal, he alone among the five Bush children will not be playing a formal role in the president's last campaign.The Democrats will be attempting to make Neil Bush a campaign issue because of his involvement with the failed Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association of Denver. He was reprimanded by federal regulators and had to pay $50,000 to help settle a government suit arising from Silverado's $1 billion collapse.

WASHINGTON -- Almost every woman in, around, close to or in any way connected with the upper reaches of the Bush White House will have her moment on the convention podium in Houston next week, part of the GOP's attempt to prove it's just as female-friendly as the next party.But this display may do little to close the sizable "gender gap" currently dogging George Bush in the polls. Although such a gap has plagued the Republican Party for at least the last decade, the trend is exacerbated this year by the scores of GOP women breaking ranks with the party over the abortion issue.

Episcopalians forming rival denomination WHEATON, Ill.: Conservatives alienated from the Episcopal Church said yesterday that they were founding a rival church denomination, the biggest challenge yet to the authority of the Episcopal Church since it ordained an openly gay bishop five years ago. The move threatens the fragile unity of the Anglican Communion, the world's third-largest Christian body, made up of 38 provinces around the world that trace their...

People may care as much about the cost of prescription drugs these days as they do about getting a good deal on a car. They're up against the breathtaking drug costs a lot more often. At least they can talk to the car salesmen. Even if we're not good at numbers, we probably get a better deal when we haggle. With cars, it's accepted as the American way. So, what if we could bargain a little on the cholesterol meds? And what if the state came onto the showroom floor (as it were) to strengthen our hand?

MIAMI -- After 47 years, Miami still waits. The horn-honking, flag-waving and impromptu street parties that erupted shortly after Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his brother late Monday continued in pockets across Miami-Dade County yesterday, but the jubilation was tempered by uncertainty. "It is a steppingstone, but the question is to what," said Leonardo Valma, 42, a history teacher who fled Cuba when he was a boy. "We all have our theories and speculations, but from the layman on the street to George Bush in the White House, that's all they are, theories and speculation."

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. -- Offering words of encouragement and the promise of "ships coming in" with gas, President Bush toured fuel-thirsty South Florida yesterday, meeting with local officials and a storm-stunned public as the area lurched uncertainly toward recovery. "Soon, more and more houses will have their electricity back on and life will get back to normal," Bush told a crowd of nearly 100 waiting at a lunch distribution center in Pompano Beach. "In the meantime, the federal government, working with the state and local government, is responding as best as we possibly can."

WASHINGTON - As the 2000 presidential recount battle raged in Florida, a little-known private attorney named John G. Roberts Jr. traveled to the state capital to dispense legal advice. Roberts operated in the shadows during at least some of those 37 days, never signing a legal brief and rarely making an appearance at the makeshift Tallahassee headquarters for George W. Bush's legal team. But now Roberts has been nominated to the Supreme Court that settled the recount by putting Bush into office - replacing the swing vote in a 5-4 case.

WASHINGTON - Malcolm X used to speak of the need to get freedom "by any means necessary." Apparently, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush feels the same about the need to get Michael Schiavo. Mr. Bush directed the state's attorney to open an investigation into whether Mr. Schiavo delayed in calling paramedics when he found his wife, Terri, passed out in their bathroom before sunrise on Feb. 25, 1990. The pretext for this is that over the years, Mr. Schiavo has given conflicting estimates of the time he found his wife.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - For most of his time in office, Gov. Jeb Bush has all but walked on water, pushing through changes that a less confident or less pedigreed politician would not have dared. But with less than two years left in power, Bush is experiencing something strange: defeat. His mind was plainly on his legacy in March, when he used his State of the State address to call for "bold, brave ideas" to "define us as dreamers, builders and problem solvers." Among his top goals were expanding a school voucher program that has been found unconstitutional and is under review by the Florida Supreme Court, and scaling back a costly constitutional requirement to reduce class size in public schools.

NOW THAT Terri Schiavo has gone -- not peacefully, but as a national spectacle -- to her maker, we are left to ponder how conservatives trashed and savaged what was supposedly their own philosophy. Whatever happened to the conservatives who were supposed to be against big government and for states' rights, separation of powers and judicial restraint? Those conservatives didn't show up in the imbroglio that involved Terri Schiavo's husband, Michael Schiavo, and her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler.

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - Legal options appeared to run out for Terri Schiavo's parents yesterday as a state judge and Florida's Supreme Court denied their petition to have their daughter's feeding tube reinserted. The rejection of the emergency petition, which detailed an 11th-hour claim that Schiavo had expressed her desire to live shortly before the feeding tube was removed, left the family imploring Gov. Jeb Bush to step in and have the state wrest custody of the severely brain-damaged woman.

WASHINGTON - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's last-minute intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, even after President Bush had ended his own effort to keep her alive, may have failed in a legal sense, but it cemented the conservative and religious credentials of a man whose political pedigree is huge and whose political future remains a subject of intense speculation. On one level, the governor's emergence as the most prominent politician still fighting to have a feeding tube reinserted in Schiavo, despite a string of court and legislative defeats, was very much in keeping with a man who has repeatedly declared a deep religious faith.