Jeb Bush, and Dying With Indignity
I remember sitting on a barstool in a Florida dive down the road from my college — where the drinks were cheap and nuclear and the bartender casually racist — watching the 2000 recount unfold with increasing certainty that things were about to become very bad, and realizing that Jeb Bush was going to be in my life forever. His brother would be president, and he, the preferred son all along, would wait in the wings. This was just the way it had been since 1994 and how it would be for the both of us, from now on.
Now it’s over. The Other Jeb will collect seven figures a year running some crooked charter school foundation. As the years pile on, his time as governor will become distant and venerated; even this abysmal 2016 campaign will get rehabilitated. It’s starting already.
In the meantime, as people joke that maybe he was the stupid brother all along, as I want to rise to a defense of all that is sane, I keep forcing myself to resist the mild temptation to feel any sympathy. Deep down, I know he’d do the same for me.
We met in high school, when my name stopped being itself and started existing publicly as Oh You Mean Like Jeb Bush? In the eyes of strangers, we were a pair. (I later interviewed two other Jebs who had the same experience.) There my name was: coming out of radios and TVs, splashed on the front page of the paper nearly every day. One day in summer 1994, friends turned my front yard into a cemetery of stolen Jeb! signs, poking up out of the lawn all eerily askew in the dark. Who the hell was this guy colonizing my life and planting a flag in my damn land?
Before Jeb dropped out of this election, Trump liked to claim Jeb was too much of a coward to put his last name on his signs. It was all bullshit. Jeb ran as Jeb! from the start of the 1994 Florida gubernatorial campaign. He was always Jeb!
And anyway, why wouldn’t he just be Jeb? It made sense. For as much as adding “Bush” in 1994 would’ve suggested coasting on the name of the father who’d left the White House barely 12 months before, omitting it also showed the willingness to risk losing a little name recognition in a conservative state. It seemed like an act of self-definition — a choice, then, instead of branding habit. Pretty soon, you knew exactly who the sign was about.
Still, though he was probably too ignorant to know it, Trump’s badgering hit on something that hearkened back to 1994.
Florida’s Democratic incumbent governor, Lawton Chiles, was down in the polls, and his campaign turned to hammering Jeb with claims that he supported dismantling Social Security and Medicare. When it doubt, terrify the grayhairs.
One week before the election, Lawton and Jeb faced off in a final debate. Jeb presented himself as a young man with fresh alternatives to the old liberal bromides and challenged the Chiles campaign’s distortions, which led to this now-famous Lawton rebuttal:
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