AUSTIN, Texas -- A few hours after the polls closed on Election Day 2000, George Prescott Bush addressed a large rally of Republican supporters here. Votes were still being tallied in Florida, where George P., as he's known to his friends and family, had grown up and where his father, Jeb Bush, was serving as governor.

"Hold on tight," George P. said as he warmed up the crowd for his uncle, George W. Bush. "Florida will put us on top, and we are going to have some change in this country."

George P. Bush was just 24 at the time -- a bright, ambitious law school student who seemed poised to make his own leap into politics. But instead of using the moment to build up his profile, as many predicted, Bush quietly retreated to Texas to focus on his private-sector career, becoming a lawyer, a businessman, a husband and father, and serving in the Navy Reserve.

Nearly six years have passed since a Bush has held public office, but that's about to change. George P. Bush, now 38, is the Republican nominee for Texas land commissioner, a powerful post that controls the state's oil and gas contracts.

This is Bush's first race. Assuming he wins -- Republicans have not lost a statewide election here since 1994 -- it probably won't be his last. Every land commissioner in the past three decades has gone on to run for lieutenant governor or governor.

Bush would be the state's first multicultural land commissioner (his mother is Mexican, and he speaks Spanish). His Hispanic background makes him different from previous Bushes. But he receives financial backing from the same oil, banking and real estate forces that helped bring his family to power.

George P. Bush

Statewide candidates in Texas need industry money to be competitive, something George W. Bush made clear during his two successful campaigns for governor. So far, George P.'s campaign has raised more than $2.8 million. His Democratic opponent, John Cook, a 68-year-old former mayor of El Paso, has raised only $35,000, in part because he refused to accept contributions from companies that do business with the state.

Bush, who did not make that pledge, has a promising future; Cook is facing all-but-certain defeat.

Eventually, "the opportunity will be there" to seek higher office, Bush told Greenwire in a broad-ranging interview in Austin last month. But "I'm not even thinking about that," he said. "You've gotta focus on the here and now."

A 'consistent conservative'

As a candidate, Bush has worked hard to prove he's not narrow-minded. He's popular with tea party activists and mainstream Republicans. He has signaled his support for immigration reform in the past. He believes that climate change is real and that Texas will eventually need to transition to renewable energy.

In the course of campaigning, Bush has met with environmental leaders to hear their concerns about hydraulic fracturing and other issues. He's made several visits to the land office, a warren of map-filled rooms in a government building across from the state Capitol, to meet with the outgoing land commissioner, Jerry Patterson (R).

Liberals and conservatives who know Bush described him as a measured person with an interest in policy -- more of a Jeb-style wonk than a backslapper like W.

"George P. is a smart guy," Bill Miller, a lobbyist and veteran Texas power broker, said in an interview. "You can tell just by being around him that he drills down. W. was a more instinctive politician, really. George P. has a little more [of an intellectual] bent to him."

Bush family Christmas

Bush spoke knowledgeably about the land office during an hourlong conversation at a bakery in northern Austin. He had a rare morning off, and looked relaxed in jeans and a Texas Rangers T-shirt.

"I'd like to think that I'm thoughtful about the issues," Bush said. He called himself a "consistent conservative" but stressed that he's willing to listen to different points of view. "I value every opportunity to learn," he said. "I don't pretend to know everything."

That attitude has won over some skeptics, but critics like Cook have made up their minds that George P. is the next in a long line of pro-energy businessmen-turned-politicians. For them, it's impossible to separate Bush from his family history.

Bush's great-great-grandfather ran an Ohio railroad company that worked with Standard Oil Co. George H.W. Bush, George P.'s grandfather, moved the family from Connecticut to Midland, Texas, where he prospered in the oil industry before entering politics. George W. Bush was an oilman, too, before joining his father's 1988 presidential campaign team.

George P. made his political debut that year, at age 12, by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans. While his grandfather was president, George P. accompanied him on fishing trips and had snowball fights on the roof of the White House.


The two remained close when George P., who was raised in the suburbs outside Miami, enrolled at Rice University in Houston in 1994. George and Barbara Bush live in Houston, and while George P. was in school there they treated him and a handful of his closest friends to monthly lunches at Molina's Cantina, a local family-owned restaurant.

Over plates of Mexican food, the group discussed classes and girlfriends, according to Chris Fide, one of Bush's roommates and best friends at Rice. But Fide said George P. rarely mentioned his family to strangers and did not use his connections to try to stand out on campus.

"George had opportunities to get something because people knew who he was," said Fide, a financial adviser who is still friends with Bush. "He never wanted the favors. He wanted to be a regular guy."

The path to politics

After college, Bush worked as a teacher in a public school in Miami. But when you're a member of a prominent political family, regular life is dictated by election cycles. In early 2000, while George P. was waiting to hear back from law schools, he quit his job to volunteer for his uncle's presidential campaign.

C-SPAN

George P. received a burst of media attention during the 2000 election, but he was often cast as the family pretty boy -- that summer People magazine ranked him fifth on its list of 100 Most Eligible Bachelors. The coverage changed in 2004. By then Bush was married, with a law degree from the University of Texas and a stronger command of issues like housing and Social Security.

In the years that followed, Bush clerked for a U.S. district court judge in Dallas. He worked for Pennybacker Capital, a real estate investment company. He did a tour in Afghanistan after being commissioned by the Navy Reserve in 2007 and started St. Augustine Partners, a small energy consulting firm that he runs out of a red-brick warehouse on a side street in Fort Worth, Texas.

Meanwhile, Bush helped launch a political action committee, called MavPAC, that raises money for young Republican candidates across the country.

He also co-founded Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a group that helps elect conservative Latinos, and can fluently speak about the Republican Party's need to expand its base beyond older, mostly white voters.

To many outsiders, the signs clearly pointed toward a future political career. But people around him insist that Bush never took that path for granted.

"I do get the sense from him that you have to pay your dues," Steve Munisteri, the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said in an interview. "That's why he's running for something at 38 and not 28."

Bush said he feels like the timing is right. He and his wife, a lawyer, have a 1-year-old son named Prescott. They own a nice home in Fort Worth. Bush has done what he wanted to do before turning to politics.

Now, "it's up to me to [convince voters] that I'm not running on a name," Bush said. "If they make the assessment that I'm not a man of my own right and my own vision, then, you know, I'm at peace with them making that decision."

Selling Texas

Oil well

Serving as land commissioner has become a steppingstone to the governor's mansion, but the position was initially designed as a unique middleman between property rights and Texan frontier culture.

The short-lived Republic of Texas created the office after gaining independence from Mexico in 1836. The government needed money to pay off its war debts -- it started out with an official balance of $55.18 in the treasury -- but had no assets except for its newly acquired land. So Texas started selling itself to make ends meet.

Over the next six decades, Texas sold or gave away 216 million acres of land -- an area the size of Montana, California and Indiana combined. Roughly 90 percent of the land in the state switched from public to private hands. Then, just as Texas was running out of real estate, wildcatters discovered oil on the Gulf Coast in 1901.

From that point on, the land office has negotiated drilling contracts and collected royalty fees and other payments from energy companies operating in Texas.

The revenue is placed into a fund for public education that's controlled by the land commissioner. In the fracking-driven boom years since 2002, the state has received $8.6 billion from the oil and gas sector -- including a record $1 billion last year alone, according to data provided by the land office.

Bootstrap campaigning

Cook knows these numbers well -- he's had plenty of time to memorize them while driving across Texas. He can't afford a campaign bus like Bush, so he's canvassing the state in his personal pickup truck.

On a hot August morning a few weeks ago, Cook was behind the wheel en route to a campaign stop in Central Texas. His wife, Tram, was along for the ride. She moved to the U.S. from Vietnam in the 1960s; they met before the Army sent Cook overseas. Cook wore cowboy boots, blue jeans and a white shirt with a bolo tie. A cowboy hat rested on the backseat.

Compared with Bush, who entered politics with certain built-in advantages, Cook's own rise has been a classic American bootstrap story.

Cook was born in Brooklyn and grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family. He served in the Vietnam War and then settled in West Texas, where he found work as a network operations manager at a telephone company.

After retiring from the telecommunications industry, Cook became involved in El Paso politics in the late 1990s and worked his way up through the City Council. He announced his candidacy for land commissioner last year, when term limits forced him to step down as mayor.

"There's two ways that you can run a political campaign," Cook said, his eyes on the road. "You can spend all of your time raising money and then use the media to come up with little sound bites. Or [you can] actually go out and engage the public. That's the strategy that I've embraced."

The public, in this case, meant 14 people who had gathered at a ranch in Bartlett to hear Cook speak.

Ignoring the poor turnout, Cook gave a short, lively talk. He praised the energy industry but said Texas needs to find a better balance between its economic growth and protecting the environment. When he was done, Cook, a skilled musician, pulled out his guitar and played Tom Petty's song "I Won't Back Down" while Tram distributed campaign fliers.

Afterward, on the way to his next event, Cook tried to draw a sharper distinction between Bush's energy policies and his own. He pointed out that, unlike him, Bush hasn't called for stricter environmental regulations or said much about renewable energy.

"He seems to be only focused on fossil fuels," Cook said. "That really goes along with his family history. The oil and gas industry has been a cornerstone of the Bush family."

Money and politics in the 'wild, wild West'

Bush filed his campaign paperwork to run for an unspecified state office in 2014 the day after the 2012 presidential election. Republican strategists pressured him to run for attorney general or governor, but choosing a slightly downballot race was the smarter move. Among other things, he's more of a shoo-in, and a victory would set a new standard. All of Bush's relatives who served in public office lost their first races.

In the most important respect, however, the choice hardly mattered. Bush is a Bush, regardless of what office he runs for. Loyalists from the family's vast donor network started sending in checks the moment it became legal to do so.

George P. raised $1.3 million in his first two months as a candidate and is on pace to pass $3 million, an unusually large sum for a land office race. He has received money from Cabinet members of his uncle's and grandfather's administrations and national Republican donors like the Texas homebuilder Bob Perry. Some of his donors have given to Bush campaigns going all the way back to the 1980s.

"There's enormous loyalty to that family. I mean, enormous," Boyden Gray said in an interview. Gray, who contributed to George P.'s campaign, served as White House counsel under George H.W. Bush and as the U.S. ambassador to the European Union under George W. Bush.

Numerous energy executives, industry groups, and major oil and gas companies have all contributed to Bush's campaign. Some, like Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Chevron Corp., drill on public land and have contracts that are negotiated by the land office. Bush's own business, St. Augustine Partners, advises energy service companies that work in Texas.

At least one state official who will serve under George P. if he wins has also given him money. Louis Renaud, a former speculator who sold oil and gas leases to George W. Bush in the 1980s -- and was later appointed to a state post after Bush became governor -- now serves as the land office's deputy commissioner of energy resources. In April, Renaud gave his potential new boss a campaign check for $500.

None of this represents an illegal conflict of interest in Texas, which has notoriously loose campaign finance laws that place few restrictions on political contributions. "It's a wild, wild West," said Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in politics. In Texas, "you can give almost anything to anybody."

The system creates two basic outcomes. Wealthy individuals and corporations help pick the state's political winners long before voters head to the polls. And there's not much that the likely also-rans, like John Cook, can do about it.

Bush acknowledged his support from the energy industry. But he said it wouldn't compromise his role as land commissioner. On the contrary, Bush said his business background makes him an ideal candidate for the job because the point of the land office, from the very beginning, has been to generate as much revenue as possible.

If he gets elected, Bush said, "At the end of the day I'll have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers of Texas. And I'm going to be brass-knuckled."

The Bush family advantage

Back in his pickup, rolling down Highway 35 in early-evening traffic, Cook reflected on the David vs. Goliath aspect of his race.

It had been a long day. After leaving the ranch in Bartlett, Cook and Tram made several more campaign stops. A few dozen supporters turned up at a Comal County Democrats lunch and donated a combined $270, but an event at a roadside barbecue fell through, and just five people attended a fundraiser in Elgin. Cook took out his guitar and played for them anyway.

Kennebunkport

"For me, being the guy on the losing side of the money factor, I don't think it's fair," he said. "And for the American public, I also think that it's terrible that money is how races are decided, and the person who can raise the most money ends up winning."

He went on, trying his best to sound upbeat. "That's a reality, but I'm not going to get discouraged about it because it's something I can't change. I'm only going to work on the things I can change, and that's voters' opinions."

With six weeks to go before the general election, Cook is an anonymous figure in most parts of Texas. Bush started out with higher name recognition, of course, and it only grew after his surprisingly strong primary win in March.

Bush captured 73 percent of the vote -- a clear indication that the family name still carries plenty of cachet among conservatives.

George W. Bush is very popular in Texas. His father is revered. And those feelings extend beyond Texas, as evidenced by the number of Americans from other states who visit their presidential museums.

On a recent visit to the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas, Danny Perkins, an auctioneer from South Carolina, was overcome with nostalgia. "I miss him," Perkins said of the 43rd president. Turning his attention to George P., Perkins said, "If his ideas are good, people would be ready to go back [to the Bushes]."

The country's appetite for a third President Bush will be tested if Jeb runs in 2016. In addition to his father, the national ambitions of two other Texans, outgoing Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R), could shape the course of George P.'s career. As Bush knows, so much in politics is beyond his control.

Given that fact, Bush is lucky to have such a handsome head start.

"So many great candidates can't even get to first base because of their inability to access the media, the money, the political credibility," Patrick Kennedy, a scion of the Kennedy family who spent 16 years representing Rhode Island in Congress, said in an interview.

But for people like Bush and himself, Kennedy said, "You can walk off high school [junior varsity] and play in the major leagues just because you have the right uniform."