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Highlights & Quotes Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a founding member of the Project for the New American Century and the brother of George W. Bush, has been a trailblazer--along with his brother--of so-called compassionate conservatism. After he lost his first bid to be Florida’s governor in 1994, Bush converted to Catholicism (his wife’s religion), began urging his fellow Republicans to pay more attention to minorities, became a godfather to a poor black boy, and opened a charter school in one of Miami’s most destitute neighborhoods. (During the 1994 governor’s race he had said he would probably do “nothing” for blacks.) (1) But compassionate conservatism apparently has its limitations. In the 1996 book Profiles in Character, which Jeb Bush coauthored with Brian Yablonski, Bush laid out his view of “modern victim movements”: “The surest way to get something in today’s society is to elevate one’s status to that of the oppressed. ... Many of the modern victim movements -- the gay rights movement, the feminist movement, the black empowerment movement -- have attempted to get people to view themselves as part of a smaller group deserving something from society. ... Eventually there will come a time when everybody will be able to claim some status as a victim of society, leaving few in society who will actually be considered the victimizers.” (4) Bush has also called for fewer death row appeals and faster executions while at the same time arguing that Florida should withdraw from Aid to Families with Dependant Children and replace it with “temporary assistance.” (5) Jeb is widely considered to have aided his brother’s controversial election victory in Florida by disqualifying thousands of predominately African American voters who were falsely accused of being convicted felons. According to a Salon.com investigation of Florida's voter rolls, “many voters, perhaps thousands, lost their right to vote because their names appeared on a flaw-ridden list generated by DBT Online (which has tight Republican ties) that included purported ‘felons.’ The investigation revealed that the lists were used in different ways at each of the state's 67 individual county election boards. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use it at all, but most used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter lists. A disproportionate number of the voters purged were Democrats.” (7) Jeb also serves as one of the Republican party’s key links to the Latino rightwing. He helped push Iran-Contra veteran Otto Reich’s nomination as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, is well-connected to anti-Castro lobbyists in Florida, and played a role in getting Orlando Bosch, a Cuban exile who was arrested in 1976 for masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airliner that resulted in the deaths of 73 people, released from prison. (8) |
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Sources
(1)
St. Petersburg Times Campaign and Election Coverage 2002 (2) Executive
Office of the Governor – Jeb Bush Bio (3) America’s
Literacy Champion (4) Jeb Bush
on Civil Rights (5) Jeb Bush
on Crime (6) George
Bush Presidential Library Foundation Trustees (7) Anthony
York, “Is Katherine Harris' Office Resisting Florida Election
Reforms?” Salon.com, August 4, 2001 (8) William Finnegan, “Castro's Shadow: America's mMan in Latin America, and His Obsession,” The New Yorker, October 14, 2002 |
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