Word: gop
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...Martinez, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in 2010, Jeb Bush's name wasn't exactly echoing throughout the peninsula. "I would have told you at that moment that Jeb wasn't even going to think about running" for Martinez's seat, says a prominent GOP Floridian. When Bush left office as Florida's governor last year, he insisted he wasn't interested in running for President, Senator or any other job that meant wading into the Beltway cesspool. And there was also the widely held notion that Bush, like Rudy Giuliani and other domineering chief...
...important reason Bush has changed his mind, say Floridians who know the committed conservative, is that he fears last month's election calamity could dilute the ideological purity of the Republican Party. In an interview this week with Newsmax.com, Bush, 55, the outgoing President's younger brother, warned the GOP against becoming "Democrat lite. We can't just 'get along.'" Despite his disdain for Washington, the Senate would at least "give Jeb a bully pulpit," says a friend. That could help him keep his party from falling too far into the centrist, bipartisan hands of new Republican leaders like...
...ideology, however; he also wants to put a fresher face on it. For all his right-wing reputation, Bush displayed a savvy dose of compassionate conservatism as governor, especially on issues like offshore drilling (he opposed his brother's attempts to revive it in Florida waters) and immigration. (The GOP's draconian anti-immigrant stand, in fact, is one of the reasons Martinez, the Senate's first Cuban American, felt he was in an uphill battle in the long run.) In a recent Politico.com interview, Bush, who is married to a Mexican and counts Florida's Latinos as a large...
...that the notoriously methodical upper chamber couldn't use some of Jeb's admirable, results-driven passion. But while his education reforms, for example, did raise the abysmal accountability level in Florida schools, their overweening emphasis on standardized testing and punitive measures is more reflective of the GOP-dominated state legislature he reigned over and not the Democrat-controlled Senate he would chafe under...
...beleaguered Republican Party has at its disposal today. Which is why the possibility of his running for Martinez's seat probably shouldn't be such a surprise after all. When a party, to quote Jeb's former-President father, is in the kind of deep doo-doo the GOP stepped into on Nov. 4, it can't afford to let one of its top talents spend any more time taking it easy in Miami...