For Jeb Bush, Life Defending the Family Name

[Denny Crane]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/us/politics/23bai.html

For Jeb Bush, Life Defending the Family Name
By MATT BAI

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — For months now, Jeb Bush has been listening as President Obama blasts his older brother’s administration for the battered economy, budget deficits and even the lax oversight of oil wells.

“It’s kind of like a kid coming to school saying, ‘The dog ate my homework,’ ” Mr. Bush, this state’s former governor, said over lunch last week at the Biltmore Hotel. “It’s childish. This is what children do until they mature. They don’t accept responsibility.”

In fact, instead of constantly bashing the 43rd president, Mr. Bush offered, perhaps Mr. Obama could learn something from him, especially when it comes to ignoring the Washington chatter. “This would break his heart, to get advice that applies some of the lessons of leadership my brother learned, because he apparently likes to act like he’s still campaigning, and he likes to blame George’s administration for everything,” Mr. Bush said, dangling a ketchup-soaked French fry. “But he really seems like he’s getting caught up in what people are writing about him.”

“I mean, good God, man, read a book!” Mr. Bush said with a laugh. “Go watch ESPN!”

At 57, Jeb Bush remains an intriguing figure inside his fractious party. At a moment when Republicans are groping for an agenda beyond opposition, Mr. Bush has long been considered one of the party’s true idea guys, someone a lot of party insiders think could still be a serious presidential contender.

But Mr. Bush, the son and brother of presidents, occupies just as intriguing a place within his own family. American presidents have traditionally felt themselves duty-bound not to criticize their successors (no matter what their successors may say about them), which means that Jeb is the only Bush in public life who can defend the family name.

“George isn’t going to break that,” Mr. Bush said, meaning the ex-presidents’ code, “and if he was asked to serve in some way, he would do it, in spite of all the ‘it’s Bush’s fault.’ That’s just the kind of guy he is.”

Often depicted as the most mercurial and bookish of the Bushes, Jeb, who now runs his own consulting firm, seems at ease out of public office. He wore a loose-fitting guayabera, rather than a suit, and responded to questions amiably, with little hint of the prickliness that has sometime marked his interactions with reporters.

Mr. Bush said he met Mr. Obama in 2009 when he accompanied his father, George Bush, to the White House a few weeks after the inauguration. “He was extraordinarily kind and gentle to my dad, which I love,” Mr. Bush said.

He gives Mr. Obama credit for trying to spur innovation in public schools, a policy area about which Mr. Bush is passionate, but his admiration ends there.

“By and large, I think the president, instead of being a 21st-century leader, is Hubert Humphrey on steroids,” Mr. Bush said. “I don’t think there’s much newness in spending more money as the solution to every problem.”

Though he headlines the occasional fund-raiser around the country, Mr. Bush has exercized his political influence this year largely out of the public view. He has been deeply involved as an informal adviser to the party’s candidates for governor, whom he sees as the most likely sources of new Republican policy ideas. “It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be happening in Washington anytime soon,” Mr. Bush dryly observed.

No matter what happens in November’s midterm elections, Republicans will have to make a difficult calibration as they head into the presidential season. The party needs a messenger who can keep its Tea Party-type activists energized behind an agenda and a nominee. But Republicans will also be looking for someone who can reposition the party nationally and make its more strident ideology palatable to the wider American electorate.

This explains why some influential Republicans persist in believing that Mr. Bush might still make a strong candidate in 2012. He is a favorite of the anti-establishment crowd (he is said to have mentored Marco Rubio, the Senate challenger in Florida who gave the Tea Partiers a national lift), but he is also a political celebrity with a pronounced independent streak. As governor, for instance, Mr. Bush strongly opposed drilling in the shallow waters off Florida, and he favors increasing legal immigration, rather than restricting it.

Mr. Bush says he has no interest in running, because he wants to make money for his family, but his political allies seem to read a “for now” into such statements. “Every presidential wanna-be and every member of the House and Senate I talk to, if you ask them who is a difference-maker in our party, they will tell you Jeb Bush,” said Al Cardenas, the former party chairman in Florida.

Washington wisdom — such as it is — holds that the real impediment to Mr. Bush’s political future would be the Bush brand, which has taken a pounding both inside the party and out. Neither George W. Bush nor his father ranks among the more successful presidents of our time, to put it politely.

Jeb Bush’s admirers insist, however, that whatever cloud existed over the name is lifting, as memories of the last Bush era recede, replaced by a hardened conservative opposition to Mr. Obama’s policies. And those who know Mr. Bush say he has never concerned himself with it. “He’s the guy who cares about that the least,” said Nicholas Ayers, executive director of the Republican Governors Association.

In fact, talking to Mr. Bush, one senses that the problem for him as a future candidate might not be the efficacy of the Bush brand, but rather what he might need to do in order to transcend it. George W. Bush ran successfully for president in part by putting some distance between himself and his father, signaling to the Republican base that he was more a Reagan conservative than he was a “read my lips” pragmatist.

It is harder to imagine Jeb Bush, the fierce defender of his family, ever publicly acknowledging his brother’s failures in a way that would enable him to come across as a different, more capable kind of Bush. When I asked him whether Mr. Obama had a legitimate point — whether his brother’s administration did, in fact, bear responsibility for the country’s economic collapse — Mr. Bush paused and, for the only time in our interview, appeared to carefully assemble his words.

“Look, I think there was a whole series of decisions made over a long period of time, the cumulative effect of which created the financial meltdown that has created the hardship that we’re facing,” he said slowly. “Congress, the administration, everyone can accept some responsibility.”

“The issue to me is what we do now,” Jeb Bush said. “Who cares who’s to blame?”

 

[Denny Crane]

Jeb Bush has always been the most articulate of the Bush family politicians. I found this an interesting read.

Of course he's going to defend his brother and play some attack dog against Obama. However, I find his last two paragraphs/quotes to be spot on.

 

[Denny Crane]

In a related story, business leaders take issue with the policies of the Democrats and Obama. I truly would be happy with a republican congress and Obama a successful two term president, but republicans are going to have to really offer up some real policy initiatives of their own, an agenda, that gives people some hope.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062205279.html

Business leaders say Obama's economic policies stifle growth

By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2010; A12

The chairman of the Business Roundtable, an association of top corporate executives that has been President Obama's closest ally in the business community, accused the president and Democratic lawmakers Tuesday of creating an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."

Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, said that Democrats in Washington are pursuing tax increases, policy changes and regulatory actions that together threaten to dampen economic growth and "harm our ability . . . to grow private-sector jobs in the U.S."

"In our judgment, we have reached a point where the negative effects of these policies are simply too significant to ignore," Seidenberg said in a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club of Washington. "By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses."

Seidenberg's remarks reflect corporate America's growing discontent with Obama. The president has assiduously courted the nation's top executives since taking office last year, seeking their counsel on economic policy in the wake of the recession and issuing dozens of invitations to the White House. In return, the Roundtable has generally supported the president's policies; it was the only major business group to back Obama's successful push for an overhaul of the health-care system.

In recent months, however, that relationship has begun to fray. First, Democrats included a provision in the health-care bill -- over the Roundtable's objection -- that reduced corporate subsidies for drug coverage to retirees, a move that could cost big companies millions of dollars. Then the EPA unveiled rules to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions even without climate-change legislation, creating uncertainty about the future cost of energy.

The final straw, said Roundtable president John Castellani, was the introduction of two pieces of legislation, now pending in Congress, that the group views as particularly bad for business. One, a provision of the administration's financial regulation overhaul, would make it easier for shareholders to nominate corporate board members. The other would raise taxes on multinational corporations. The rhetoric accompanying the tax proposals has been particularly harsh, Castellani said, with Democrats vowing to campaign in this fall's midterm elections on a platform of punishing companies that move jobs overseas.

"We had been working very closely with them," Castellani said, but things kept popping up that were "not just an irritant but a distraction" to promoting economic growth.

White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki disputed that notion. "The president has consistently pursued policies designed to create a better climate for American businesses in order to foster job creation, innovation and economic growth," she said via e-mail. "We have always had an open door to the business community, and we look forward to an ongoing dialogue."

A White House official said the administration has a "very good relationship" with Seidenberg and expects that to continue. Seidenberg is one of a number of chief executives who have met several times with Obama and repeatedly with senior officials. In February alone, he was invited to dinner with Obama and to the president's Super Bowl party.

Seidenberg, whose company is at odds with the Federal Communications Commission over a plan to regulate broadband providers, first expressed his concerns about the direction of Democratic economic policy in a meeting last month with White House budget director Peter Orszag. When Orszag asked for specifics, Seidenberg polled the members of the Business Roundtable and a sister organization, the Business Council. The result was a 54-page document, delivered to Orszag on Monday, chock full of bullet points about actions taken or considered by a wide array of executive agencies, including the White House Middle Class Task Force and the Food and Drug Administration.

"We believe the cumulative effect of these proposals will help defeat the objectives we all share -- reducing unemployment, improving the competitiveness of U.S. companies and creating an environment that fosters long-term economic growth," Seidenberg wrote in a cover letter for the document, titled "Policy Burdens Inhibiting Economic Growth."

In his speech, Seidenberg said he has been "encouraged" by the administration's response to the letter, which includes an offer of additional meetings to discuss the specific complaints. And he denied that his relationship with Obama has deteriorated, saying he has visited the White House more times in the past year than "in the previous 16."

Obama "is not ignoring us," Seidenberg said. The problem, he said, is translating those discussions into policy actions that do not simply expand government, but help a nervous private sector "create work" in uncertain times.

 

[BLAZER PROPHET]

That's why I somewhat jokingly like to say 'it's Bush's fault'. I learned a long time ago to be fully accountable for my actions, and to not blame the disposition on other people. But politicians love to do this. When the Obama people continually push their failings off onto Bush it makes them look bad- very bad. The real shame of it all is that our President has not learned this lesson. I think it could hurt him when he runs for reelection.