Jeb Bush Tells Michael Barbaro: "I'm Not Like My Brother": Live from The Roasterie CCCXIII: August 21, 2014
This is, in my opinion, laying it on much too thick: both Michael Barbaro and whoever is flacking for Jeb Bush (why is a Connecticut-Maine Yankee named after a Confederate cavalry general who rounded up free Blacks in Pennsylvania and sent them south to be sold as slaves rather than scouting the location of the U.S. army before Gettysburg, anyway?) should be working harder...
Michael Barbaro: Jeb Bush Gives Party Something to Think About: "As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush flew in Ivy League social scientists for daylong seminars...
...with his staff and carved out time for immersive brainstorming sessions he called “think weeks.” A voracious reader, he maintains a queue of 25 volumes on his Kindle (George Gilder’s “Knowledge and Power” among them, he said) and routinely sends fan mail to his favorite authors. A self-described nerd, he is known to travel with policy journals and send all-hours inquiries to think tanks....
The younger Mr. Bush seems to have defined himself as the anti-George W. Bush: an intellectual in search of new ideas, a serial consulter of outsiders who relishes animated debate and a probing manager who eagerly burrows into the bureaucratic details. Allies said that reputation--as what the Republican strategist Karl Rove called the “deepest thinker on our side”--could prove vital in selling Mr. Bush as a presidential candidate to an electorate still scarred by George W. Bush’s legacy of costly wars abroad and economic meltdown at home. But the bookishness and pragmatism that strike mainstream Republican leaders as virtues highlight the potential difficulty that Mr. Bush may face in igniting the passions of more conservative members of the party....
Those who have hashed over policy and politics with Mr. Bush describe him as a conservative animated less by rigid ideology than a technocrat’s quest to identify which solutions work best. “He’s not interested in proving some sort of conservative point that less government is better, though he might believe that,” said Philip K. Howard, the author of influential books about law and government, who has spoken frequently with Mr. Bush. “In all of my dealings with him, he’s interested in how you make government deliver effectively. What are the incentives? How do you hold people accountable?” He added: “These are the discussions, frankly, that you want government leaders to have.”
Friends and former aides have variously described him as a “policy wonk,” an “ideas junkie” and, as Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, called him, “a top-drawer intellect.” It is a cerebral image that Mr. Bush readily and conspicuously embraces.... These days, the younger Mr. Bush peppers his speeches with statistics, academic-sounding references to “quintiles” and self-deprecating jokes about his own geekiness. A few weeks ago, he boasted to a crowd of Republican donors that he was “nerdy enough” to read City Journal, an obscure policy magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, then recited the names of his favorite writers at the publication.... Under Mr. Bush, who served from 1999 to 2007, the Florida governor’s office at times resembled a mini-university.... “It was this culture of creativity and intellectual curiosity,” said Brian Yablonski, who ran Mr. Bush’s policy office and remains a confidant. “It permeated everything”...