The astonishing achievements of Bush’s eight years in office will soon, he hopes, be familiar to primary voters. Even Republican non-Floridians might have missed them if they weren’t paying attention.
“Jeb Bush is as conservative as any governor in America, and much more so than most,” wrote the journalist Tucker Carlson in 1999. “But you’d never know it unless you listened carefully, or took a close look at the bills he supports. If Bush’s legislation is radical, his tone is all accommodation and empathy.”
The Bush record in Florida is like a wish list conjured from right-wing daydreams. With Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature, “Bush made Florida into a laboratory of conservative governance,” writes Matthew T. Corrigan in
Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida, destined for now to be the definitive account of Bush’s eight years in Tallahassee.
Corrigan is a political science professor at the University of North Florida and shows every indication of having the political leanings common to his trade. He records with mounting horror the list of Bush’s successes. While Florida’s population grew by two million, the state government’s workforce declined by 13,000—the result of sweeping privatization of everything from state park maintenance to personnel management. At least one kind of state tax or another was cut every year he was in office, for a total of $19 billion. He left office with a $3 billion surplus in the state treasury. For the first time in history the state earned a AAA bond rating.
It helped that in his first two years his state, like many others in the blissful ’90s, was awash in cash, pouring in from the economic boom and from billion-dollar settlements with tobacco companies. An Associated Press headline from 1999 summarized the lucky position he found himself in: “Bush budget has it all: spending increases, tax cuts.” Spending increases were of a particular kind: More money was poured into care for seniors, for instance, but only to fund vouchers and other mechanisms that transferred control of their care from state ins utions to family members or the seniors themselves. Otherwise the fiscal discipline continued through flush times and bad, often against the opposition of some powerful Republican legislators, who saw no reason why new revenue had to be returned to the taxpayers. One bitter Republican leader called Bush and his staff “Shiite Republicans.”
The epithet was directed as well at Bush’s nonfiscal agenda. After a mad rush in the first year, he and the legislature ran out of ways to liberalize gun laws; the Stand Your Ground law implicated in the Trayvon Martin shooting was a Bush-era innovation. Under Bush, Florida even exempted gun shops from state rules regulating chemical runoff into the water table, a legislative two-fer beyond the imagination of the most fevered deregulating gun nut.
Bush’s attempts to limit abortion were unprecedented in Florida and most other states too. Many of the laws were overturned by hostile state judges, but even so, only a few years into the Bush era, the Florida legislature had banned partial-birth abortion, imposed parental notification requirements on minors seeking abortions, subsidized antiabortion pregnancy centers, funded pro-life billboards along state highways, and even offered a “Choose Life” license plate. Bush’s rhetoric in pursuing his social agenda was typically rounded. He framed parental notification, for instance, not as a means to reduce abortions but an opportunity for parents “to love and console.” His stubborn fight for the right to life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman whose husband obtained a court order to hasten her death by denying her food and water, drew international attention, much of it horrified.
“I just think it’s humorous,” Tom Feeney says now, when reminded that lots of reporters and Republicans are calling Bush a moderate. “It’s pure revisionism for anyone to ignore the fact that he was the most conservative governor in the country.”
Reply With Quote
