Bush has maintained a national profile on the issue with which, as governor, he had sought to make his biggest mark: education reform. Illustration by Dan Adel

In December, Jeb Bush posted an update on his Facebook page which began by reporting that, over Thanksgiving, he and his family had “shared good food and watched a whole lot of football.” He added, “We also talked about the future of our nation. As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.”

The wording of the announcement was oddly diffident. It was widely known that Bush had been “actively exploring” the possibility of a campaign at least since the spring, when he started showing up at the gym in the grand Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, where he keeps his office, with a personal trainer and new workout gear. But there had been as yet no signs of a commitment. “It’s the telegraph people have been waiting for,” Jim Nicholson, a former Republican National Committee chairman and Cabinet secretary under President George W. Bush, said.

The announcement inevitably renewed questions about the desirability of political dynasties and about whether Jeb was being propelled to run, in part, by fraternal rivalry. “There’s always been a friendly competition among the siblings in the family, and that’s just human nature, I suppose,” George P. Bush, Jeb’s older son, told me. As Jeb, who was the governor of Florida for two terms, has followed his brother’s career, he has also stood apart from it. “There is kind of George W.’s world, and then there’s Jeb’s world, and frankly there’s not a lot of intersection,” Mark McKinnon, who was a senior adviser to George W.’s Presidential campaigns, said. Jeb is more introverted and more ideological than both his father, George H. W. Bush, whose politics are driven more by personal associations than by doctrine, and his brother, whose conservatism is more instinctual than considered. It was Jeb who signed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, and fought to keep Terri Schiavo on life support.

Now, though, as a result of the rightward shift in the Republican Party, Bush is being viewed as a moderate in the emerging Presidential field. He has strong support among the Party’s establishment and donor class, but his popularity among the current conservative rank and file is difficult to gauge. Since he left office, Bush has maintained a national profile through his work on the issue with which, as governor, he had sought to make his biggest mark: education reform. But, after leading the way in pushing a conservative vision for America’s schools, Bush is now caught in the midst of an unexpected upheaval on the issue within his own party.

His level of enthusiasm for running has also been difficult to assess. He has often cited worries about the effect that a campaign would have on his family, especially on his wife, Columba, who dislikes the role of political spouse. George P. Bush told me that it would be hard for his father to relinquish the life in business that he has led since leaving office, in 2007. “People forget that before he went into public service he was in real estate and has always had a business mind,” his son said.

The family that, over three generations, has served in the White House (twice), the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the governors’ mansions of two states is also a family of businessmen. Prescott Bush was a partner at the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, but, even as he thrived on Wall Street, with a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and three live-in maids, he declined to run for a vacant House seat in 1946, because he didn’t think he could afford it. He was finally elected to the Senate in 1952, at the age of fifty-seven. His son George H. W. Bush didn’t enter politics until he had become a millionaire in the Texas oil industry; he was elected to Congress in 1966, when he was forty-two. Doug Wead, who served as an adviser to both Presidents Bush, told me, “I don’t think it’s about money for money’s sake. It’s a way of defining who I am and where I sit in the history of the family: ‘Can I do it? Can I be a real man?’ Just imagine the pressure. The first step in life in the Bush family is: Can I make a million?”

After college, Jeb worked for the Texas Commerce Bank in Venezuela before returning to join his siblings—George; their younger brothers, Neil and Marvin; and their sister, Dorothy—on their father’s 1980 Presidential campaign. Jeb campaigned mostly in Florida; having learned enough Spanish to court his wife, whom he met on a high-school exchange trip to Mexico, he had become fluent while in Caracas, an asset in Miami’s Little Havana. After George H. W. Bush lost to Ronald Reagan in the primaries, Jeb and Columba settled in Miami to raise their three children—George P., Noelle, and Jeb, Jr.

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Armando Codina, a Cuban-American real-estate developer who had supported George H. W. Bush’s campaign, offered Jeb a forty-per-cent stake, with no money down, in his company, Codina Partners. Bush’s role was to find tenants for commercial developments, and he easily won over colleagues and clients with his unassuming manner. A few separate deals he was involved in came under scrutiny, including one with a company that sold water pumps in Nigeria, but Bush was never accused of any wrongdoing. He considered running for Congress, but, according to Peter and Rochelle Schweizer’s biography “The Bushes,” his father persuaded him to wait until he had made more money. He served as the chairman of the Dade County G.O.P. and, in 1987, became the state commerce secretary under Governor Bob Martinez but left the post less than two years later to work on his father’s successful Presidential campaign. Around that time, he decided to run for governor, and, in 1992, with his father’s reëlection in doubt, he began to focus on a gubernatorial campaign for the 1994 election. (By then, he had a net worth of more than two million dollars.) In Texas, his brother did the same, which the family viewed as an intrusion on Jeb’s more serious effort. After Bush senior left the White House, he spent far more time campaigning in Florida than in Texas.

Unlike George, Jeb embraced the ascendant right-wing orthodoxy: he declared himself a “head-banging conservative”; vowed to “club this government into submission”; and warned that “we are transforming our society to a collectivist policy.” On Election Night, he lost narrowly to the incumbent, Lawton Chiles. George Bush, having shown himself to be an unexpectedly able candidate, with a more modulated tone than his brother, beat the incumbent Texas governor, Ann Richards, by more than eight points.

After the loss, Jeb returned to business, working primarily with Codina Partners again. It wasn’t clear if he would continue to pursue a political career. Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida G.O.P. (who died in October), told me that Bush had said, “I don’t know if I’m going to run for governor again or not, because I’d rather go settle some stuff with my wife.” Campaigning had been a strain on the family, but, Slade added, “I remember having heard Columba say, ‘Jebby really loves politics,’ and kind of sigh.”