S.V. Dáte is White House correspondent for National Journal and author of Jeb: America’s Next Bush. Follow him on Twitter at @svdate.

By the end, Jeb Bush thought I was a jerk. Also that I was the least fair journalist in all of Tallahassee. I only did “hit” pieces designed to “screw” him, he wrote an economist who had talked to me about Bush’s crackdown on gasoline price-gouging. And no, Bush emailed me, he absolutely would not be interviewed for the biography I was writing of him. And just to be clear: It wasn’t because he was simply too busy. He was choosing not to spend time being interviewed: “Please don’t mark me down as neutral regarding the eight hours or any hours. No can do.”

On the plus side, in spite of my “evil ways,” he said in that same note, he liked my “spunk”—so at least I had that going for me.


This was the John Ellis Bush I had known and covered for 10 long years: a man who viewed politics as combat but who, in the end, respected those who could give as good as they got. Bush liked those reporters who came to him prepared; too many didn’t, and he ate up people like

that.

Of course, it wasn’t all late-night nastygrams and unceremonious no’s. On less tense occasions, we had in-the-weeds discussions about tax and budget policy, as well as a tutorial about the VeggieTales characters. As Florida governor, he was accessible enough to exchange emails directly with the general public, other reporters—even me.

I had come to Tallahassee after covering NASA for four years, and I spent all of Bush’s eight years as governor covering his administration for the Palm Beach Post, from his winning 1998 campaign through the January afternoon in 2007 when he left office. I watched, listened and asked some questions he was happy to answer—and many more he didn’t have any use for. Over that time, I read thousands of email messages and government records and observed hundreds of hours of Bush answering thousands of questions in formal and informal settings.

The word “relentless” doesn’t begin to explain this Bush. I’ve yet to encounter any other politician as smart, as driven, as self-disciplined, as organized, as single-minded about his goals—or as certain about his views.

And when it came to dealing with the press corps, Bush wasn’t afraid to let that certainty shine through. He’s almost always the smartest guy in the room—and he made sure to remind us of that in news conference after news conference, eviscerating reporters who came unprepared or with wishy-washy questions. In politics, Bush has always seen the world starkly—you’re either with him or you’re against him. And the press, he was convinced, was usually against him.

While his brother George W. was famous for seeming to embrace the press corps—doling out chummy nicknames for favored reporters—Jeb has always been more circumspect, viewing the press as little more than a distraction from the activity he prefers doing: governing and running things. Based on our experiences with him as governor, he is likely to have little patience for the silliness that surrounds presidential campaigning—the miniscandals, the fumbles, the walkbacks, the foibles. And he seems particularly ill-prepared for campaigning in the YouTube era: His biggest press stumbles as governor came when he didn’t think anyone was listening—and now he’s got to be prepared for an age when someone is always listening.

Jeb Meets the Press Although he communicated with constituents on his own terms through relentless emailing and virtual "town halls" (above right), Jeb Bush had no choice but to contend with the local press corps during events like Hurricane Charley (center) and his brother's presidential campaign (bottom left). | Joe Raedle/Getty; Mark Foley/AP; Gregory Bull/AP; Mark Foley/AP

If, though, he wins the White House, where he can impose strict message discipline and dole out scoops to chosen reporters while protected and isolated inside a Secret Service bubble—well, that might finally provide the scrutiny-free work environment that he’s always seemed to crave.

***

Jeb isn’t actually a Floridian. He was born in Midland, Texas, on February 11, 1953, but he’s not really a Texan either. Jeb is a Bush, first, last and always; it’s been his one consistent calling card and identity through his life—and played a key role in shaping his career and his fortune. In fact, being a Bush has been effectively his only career. He’s not a lawyer, a doctor or a legislator, and he’s never been to business school like George W.

He’s almost always the smartest guy in the room — and he made sure to remind us of that in news conference after news conference, eviscerating reporters who came unprepared.

He followed family tradition and attended Phillips Academy Andover, but he broke with the Bush legacy at Yale to attend the University of Texas at Austin to be closer to the girl he had met during an Andover program in Mexico, Columba Garnica de Gallo. He graduated with a degree in Latin American studies in just 2 1/2 years, and they married soon after at UT-Austin’s University Catholic Center, in 1974. He took a job with Texas Commerce Bank, founded by the family of George H.W. Bush friend James Baker, and as a 24-year-old was sent to Venezuela to help open a branch in the oil-rich country. He returned to the United States in 1979 to help with his father’s political career and moved his family to Florida in 1981.

At the time, Bush had young kids and was nearly broke—at one point, he paid his MasterCard bill with his American Express—but by the time he settled in the Sunshine State, his father was vice president of the United States, and his future suddenly looked much brighter.

He took a job in Florida real estate—he had no experience, but a wealthy Miami developer, Armando Codina, made Bush a 40 percent partner in his business. They renamed his company the Codina Bush Group. Bush’s goals at the time were straightforward: “I’d like to be very wealthy,” he told a Miami News reporter in 1983. Over the next 15 years, before he entered the governor’s mansion, there was little pattern to his business deals, except for one fact: They helped make him very wealthy. As the St. Petersburg Times reported as just one example, Bush put $1,000 in an office building called Museum Tower in 1984, and then six years later sold out of it for $346,000. He has always bristled at reporters’ questions about his business dealings and the fortune he built. “You either trust me or you don’t,” he told reporters during the 1998 campaign. When the Tampa Tribune investigated Bush’s Florida business ventures that year, Bush’s team responded by cutting off access: Tribune reporters were banned from traveling with the candidate, phone calls went unreturned and the paper was not sent event schedules or press schedules.

None of the media attention to his business fortune, though, slowed his political ascent in 1998. While his first try for the governor’s office, in 1994, was a surprise failure, his second bid seemed a near sure thing from the start. He beat the sitting lieutenant governor by 10 points.

As governor, he inherited a state with a proud tradition of uniquely strict open-meetings and public records laws, some of which date all the way back to 1909. The Sunshine State has long prided itself on its “government in the sunshine” provisions, even enshrining aspects into the state constitution in 1992. If the government wants to keep a record inaccessible, it requires a two-thirds vote of both legislative chambers—a stunningly high threshold. Moreover, the state’s laws clearly govern when and where government leaders can meet and discuss legislation and government action—even prohibiting the governor from meeting with legislative leaders unless the meeting is appropriately announced in advance.

That tradition lasted less than 24 hours into Jeb Bush’s term: On his first full day as governor, he hosted a secret meeting with Florida’s House speaker and Senate president, both Republican allies.

When the capital press corps questioned him about the meeting and its apparent violation of the clear prohibition on such unannounced gatherings, we got our first taste of Annoyed Jeb.

He can be a daunting physical presence—6 feet 4 inches tall, somewhere north of 200 pounds, with a large head. In friendly settings, he often stoops a bit to seem less intimidating, but when he’s hostile, as he would sometimes get in news conferences, the stoop disappears. He draws himself up to his full height, arms crossed, eyes flashing and nostrils flaring, and gives a pursed glower that we came to know well. That day, under questioning about his secret meeting, he assumed the pose we would see again and again in the years ahead.

He told us that he would avoid such missteps in the future and abide by the state constitution. But what he really meant became clear as time went on: He would abide by the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it. The administration instead switched to tactics like having staff members gather instead of the elected officials—meetings not governed by the open-meetings law—or by making individual phone calls to one official at a time, rather than gathering them together.

He promised at the beginning of his administration to be accessible—which he mostly was, unless you disagreed with him or did harm to his agenda. From the earliest days of his governorship, he regularly “gaggled” with the press throughout the week in the hallways of the Statehouse, in addition to frequent news conferences during which Bush would hold forth for extended periods. You missed them at your peril. “If Jeb had a five-minute gaggle, he might give you five different stories,” says Adam Smith, the political editor at the Tampa Bay Times.

Most of the time, he was civil, direct, even funny. He seemed to love the intellectual engagement of sparring with the media—taking pleasure, at least at first, in the back-and-forth in a way that many politicians do not. When in his first State of the State speech he mentioned that families needed two incomes to get by, I asked in an email whether Floridians’ apparent desire for bigger, more expensive houses and giant SUVs might not be driving the need for higher incomes.

Bush responded with a thoughtful, 300-word reply. “[L]et me say that many things we spend money on enhance our quality of life. Many people live better, healthier, longer because of new products. For example, that SUV has less auto pollution and is safer than the generation of cars previous,” he wrote. “The point I was making today is that we are now paying a significantly higher price for the government we have. My 40% of median family income is a real number (the range of income is 35% to 40%) but it is understated. When you add the cost of regulation to the mix, the cost of what we pay for organizing society to [sic] is well over 50% of what we earn.” Then he added this postscript: “I GET A FREE RIDE ON SPELLING AND GRAMMAR SINCE THIS IS EMAIL!!!!”

Pressure Points Bush came under media fire for his school voucher and anti-affirmative action programs. During one tense meeting with black lawmakers, he declared, "Kick their asses out," later clarifying he meant the reporters. | Mark Foley/AP; Phil Coale/AP

The exception, of course, was on stories that challenged his worldview or—even worse—his candor. In those instances, watch out, because Bush the public servant would disappear and Bush the competitor would emerge. You were no longer a reporter then, but instead had joined the ranks of The Enemy: teachers’ unions, trial lawyers, activist judges, the Democratic Party.

And the state’s public records laws—and the media’s use of them—quickly arose as an enemy to Jeb Bush running Florida the way he wanted to run Florida.

Those laws imposed tight time restrictions under which documents had to be produced—deadlines that previous administrations and other elected officials didn’t have trouble meeting. Yet Bush stretched the deadlines longer and longer; at first, the excuses came that they were getting organized, but the more Bush’s “system” got into place, the longer it took to turn over documents.

The Bush administration began to take advantage of a photocopying fee allowed for each page of a records release, a fee that let it stonewall reporter requests by quoting thousands of dollars in fees. The press corps began asking for electronic documents, which was also allowed and also reduced the fees to just $1—the cost of a blank CD.

It wasn’t a personal vendetta against me. Bush’s team didn’t mind making it personal with lots of reporters it considered too critical.

Receiving electronic documents proved a treasure trove for inquiring reporters. In one investigation, my paper found that a private-schools lobbyist had actually written the “compliance form” proposed by the Bush administration to fix problems with his voucher programs. The governor’s education aide had received the document, “Suggested DOE Database for Private Schools Participating in Scholarship Program,” from the lobbyist at 6:26 p.m. on August 11, 2003. At 6:57 p.m., the aide emailed the document to the Department of Education, after deleting the word “Suggested,” and asked, “Will you please have someone take this document and put the DOE logo on top?”

That wasn’t the kind of attention the Bush administration wanted for one of its signature programs, and it quickly figured out a new roadblock, instituting a $1,500 fee for such disclosures—$1 for the CD and $1,499 for processing. The Department of Education went one step further, charging reporters for the time it took a lawyer to redact the documents. We were told it would cost $7,000 to release nine months’ worth of emails of its three top officials.

My coverage in the Post of the school voucher program accelerated the deterioration of my relationship with Bush. In December 2003, the governor banished me and my Post colleagues from a round of year-end interviews with him in the governor’s office, just after we had published a series of articles exposing fraud, abuse and a lack of oversight in those beloved school voucher programs.

It wasn’t actually a personal vendetta against me alone; in fact, Bush’s team didn’t mind making it personal with a number of reporters it considered too critical. A Tampa Tribune colleague who aggressively covered the governor was the target of attacks, and, after the reporter left the paper in 2000, Bush told its editorial board that he was glad the Tribune had dealt with its “little problem” in Tallahassee.

Our battle over the school voucher program, though, was a reflection of a larger evolution in the latter years of Bush’s administration—when he went from tolerating the press to open warfare.

For most of his first decade in Florida politics, Bush’s press team had been composed of a string of amiable spokespeople with backgrounds in campaigns and government. His first spokesman in the 1994 campaign, Cory Tilley, had worked as the Maine governor’s press secretary and interned with Bush’s confidante Sally Bradshaw in the George H.W. Bush White House. Next came Justin Sayfie, a well-liked spokesman who balanced spin with the public’s right to know. His third press secretary, Katie Baur, was another former Bush 41 White House intern.

In 2002, though, Bush made a qualitative change in his press shop as he faced an

unexpectedly tough reelection campaign. He was tiring of the press’s intrusiveness—the pesky questions, the obvious-to-him agendas behind the media flare-ups. In a 2002 email about news coverage of his social services secretary’s biblical views on marriage and corporal punishment, Bush wrote: “I am no longer amazed at the anti-Christian feelings in the press.”

He tapped Jill Bratina, a professional hired gun from tiremaker Bridgestone-Firestone. The company had been battling allegations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that its faulty tires were responsible for 271 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Bratina had fiercely defended the company through the scandal, repeatedly saying that the company’s tires were safe, even as it ultimately paid more than half a billion dollars to settle lawsuits and costs associated with recalling 6.5 million tires. Before Bridgestone-Firestone, Bratina had helped defend the company behind the diet drug fen-phen and Dow Chemical amid issues with its silicone breast implants.

Bratina, and later her protégé, Alia Faraj, brought a new, aggressive, full-contact style to Bush’s press operation, imposing unprecedented “message discipline” over the governor’s office and the executive branch. It was exactly what Bush wanted: He didn’t like the news stories that seemed to question the good he was doing for the state of Florida. In a 2006 email to a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times who had written about budget cuts to Pinellas County schools, Bush said: “I look forward to the day when able observers like yourself focus on performance and not misinforming the public.”

In fact, as his time in office passed, Bush’s comments about the press grew more blunt—often seemingly focused on the fact that he didn’t consider them worthy intellectual adversaries. Access, in his book, is hardly the same as respect. In his second term, he shared with his family’s authorized biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, exactly what he thought of us: “You have the political press writing about nonpolitical issues. Most of these people are not the most brilliant people in the world, and when you get them out of their area, writing about the family, it can be a little bit scary.”

***

Even as Bush left the state Capitol eight years ago on a chilly January afternoon following successor Charlie Crist’s inaugural, it was clear that this wouldn’t be the end of our relationship. The book I had written about his time in office, the one he once called “a novel,” would come out within weeks. Then, at some point, Bush would embark on his next and final political quest, and we would be dealing with each other again.

So it was with some trepidation that I traveled to New Hampshire this past March for Bush’s first visit to the state in 15 years.

Back during his 2000 visit to the state, his hair was still black, he didn’t yet wear reading glasses and the 16-hour days he had kept as governor without making time for exercise had added the predictable inches in the predictable places. He brought a plane of Floridians, among them one Katherine Harris, of future recount fame, and spent a near-zero-degree Saturday walking Manchester, passing out Florida oranges and strawberries, and asking locals to support his brother in the upcoming presidential primary.

Over the years since, the conventional wisdom of a Jeb presidential bid has gone from doesn’t-want-it … to might-even-succeed-his-brother … to his-brother-has-ruined-it-for-him … to he-just-wants-to-go-home-and-make-money … to his-wife-won’t-let-him … to front-runner from America’s chief Republican political dynasty.

While his brother was famous for seeming to embrace the press corps, Jeb has always been more circumspect, viewing the press as little more than a distraction.

For most of that time, it seemed clear to me that he would run no matter what. After all, Jeb was the golden child of the Bush family, the one destined to follow in his father’s footsteps to the White House—except that he amazingly lost the 1994 gubernatorial campaign that he was supposed to win, while George had won the Texas race he was supposed to lose.

One time we saw through Bush’s guarded public image. Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling settling the 2000 election in his brother’s favor, Jeb sat with the press corps around a big conference table. The weeks since Election Day must have taken a toll; after all, he was governor of the state whose inability to count votes had cast his brother’s presidential election into 36 days of chaos. For more than an hour that day, he spoke in a way I had never heard before and haven’t heard since.

Somehow he got to recounting how he had married too young and started a family before he could really afford to. Sensing an opening, one reporter asked: What was it like to have a brother who was president, rather than be president himself?

Wilfredo Lee/AP

Jeb’s answer was dismissive: President? Who wants to be president? You can’t change anything in Washington. A governor can change things. A president can’t. That’s why I like being governor.

Someone asked: So, you don’t want to be president?

Bush shook his head. Nope.

No one in the room believed him, not for a minute. Least of all, probably, himself.

So when the word went out earlier this year that he would be taking his “ actively-exploring-the-possibility” road show to the First-In-The-Nation primary state, I booked a ticket from Reagan National and downloaded the Manchester-to-Seacoast driving routes on Google Maps. I had to be there.

New Hampshire presents a particularly interesting test for Bush, an introverted policy wonk who does best when he can let his facts do the talking—preferably in full sentences and extended paragraphs that highlight his mastery of an issue. He’s not good at chitchat and small talk, the essence of retail politics. And New Hampshire voters see it as their duty to vet presidential candidates personally—they expect to be courted.

During Bush’s three governor’s races in Florida, he never had to struggle to get people to like him. Floridians, and especially the Republicans among them, adored him just for being George and Barbara’s son. Wherever he went, he was greeted like a rock star. That’s not the case today in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina. Today, he starts in a hole and has to charm his way out.

Not surprisingly, I was hardly the only journalist curious about Bush’s foray to the Granite State. Reporters outnumbered employees at Integra Biosciences, a medical equipment manufacturer about 20 miles south of Manchester that Bush’s people had chosen to host a “business roundtable.” When Bush walked in, I could see that the paleo diet he had been publicly joking about had made a big difference. He had dropped 25, 30, perhaps 35 pounds since I’d last seen him.

Bush greeted the reporters and met his hosts, and the entire pack shuffled inside for a tour of the facilities. He offered his thoughts on taxes and regulations to the owner, chatted in Spanish to some of the employees, posed for a couple of pictures—and then did a double take when he spotted me.

“Dáte!” he called out with a smile. “Nice to see you!”

***

Jeb Bush has always been his own top strategist—accepting and rejecting staffers’ and consultants’ advice as it suits him. Throughout his career, only one person has come close to “handling” Jeb Bush—Sally Bradshaw, a 49-year-old Mississippi-born political consultant who is Bush’s closest confidante. The two met during George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, when newly graduated Bradshaw was dispatched to pick up Jeb at an airport in the car she had, with much pride, purchased on her own. Bush berated her because it wasn’t an American make.

Bradshaw worked on Bush’s first campaign in 1994, then at his Foundation for Florida’s Future (which served as a campaign-in-waiting), then ran his second campaign in 1998 and finally was his first chief of staff in the governor’s office. More recently, as Bush prepared to embark on his “exploring-the-possibility” tour, it was Bradshaw crisscrossing the country laying the groundwork.

By now, Bush has become adept at pushing through the message he wants to deliver, regardless of the question. In doing so, though, he’s always been blunt—sometimes to a fault. John “Mac” Stipanovich, who helped run Bush’s 1994 campaign, says he had had a lot of experience prepping politicians for encounters with the media, walking through possible questions and good answers. Things to avoid saying. “You know, script them. Lay it out. Not with Jeb,” he recalls. “I was not unschooled in such matters, yet I did not ‘handle’ him.”

During that first governor’s race, with Bradshaw and Stipanovich at his side, Bush was famously direct in his answers. When asked at one event what he would do for the black community, Bush answered: “Probably nothing.”

“He was a first-time candidate. He was learning as he went,” Stipanovich says. “Good politicians, their mind moves at least a second faster than their mouths. I think it would be accurate to say there was no time lapse in ’94.”

By the second time around, Bush had learned what to say and what not to say, Stipanovich says. “If Jeb believed in 10 things in ’94, he felt obliged to talk about all 10 of them, even though most Floridians only agreed with him on four,” Stipanovich says. “In ’98, he only talked about the four.”

Back on Camera In his 2016 bid, Bush faces a new challenge in the national press corps—like the reporters at his March 2015 New Hampshire visit, including (at left in red), author S.V. Dáte. | Ian Thomas Jensen Lonnquist/New York Times via Redux Pictures

As he became more disciplined, Bush became more defensive in dealings with the press. Early in his first term, the governor traveled to Naples, Florida, a Bush-friendly place full of Republican retirees from the Midwest. He gave a speech and only afterward learned that reporters had been in the audience. What he said was mostly unremarkable; the local papers didn’t even bother to write about it. But upon his return to Tallahassee, he sent this note to his top aides: “This is just a friendly reminder to check if there are reporters at events. I was more forthright than I would have been had I known. Thanks team.”

Two of Bush’s biggest PR disasters, in fact, happened because he said things he did not realize would become public knowledge. The first nearly cost his brother the presidency in 2000; the second could have cost him his own reelection two years later.

It was late 1999 when Bush decided he needed to pre-empt an initiative on the November 2000 ballot to ban affirmative action in Florida. Such a divisive ballot question, many Republicans feared, would boost minority turnout and help Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in the key swing state. In response, Bush announced his “One Florida” executive order that ended race-based preferences in university admissions and contracting—but replaced them with race-neutral language to accomplish the same goals. Things fell apart when prominent minority leaders, reluctant to give up hard-fought gains for an unproven promise, complained Bush hadn’t consulted with them prior to announcing his proposal.

Two black lawmakers went to the governor’s office and announced they weren’t leaving until Bush met with them. Bush didn’t want to meet but did take the time to poke his head in the room to tell them: “I suggest you get some blankets. You’re in for a long stay.”

The lawmakers called reporters to invite them to their “sit-in.” A spectacle developed. That evening, Bush dug himself in deeper: While waiting to tape a TV interview, he answered a staffer’s question about what should be done: “ Kick their asses out.”

Bush didn’t realize the camera was rolling. After the clip aired, he tried to explain that he was referring to the reporters’ asses, not those of the black lawmakers, but the damage was done. One of the lawmakers organized a massive protest, and then a voter registration drive, and then a voter turnout effort. The result was 280,000 more black voters on Election Day—without whom Gore wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near that 537-vote margin.

Two years later, during his reelection campaign, Bush spent much time and energy trying to defeat an amendment, backed by the teachers’ union, that would cap the size of public school classrooms. Bush argued it would be ridiculously costly, requiring massive cuts to social services, and that smaller classes weren’t effective anyway. At a meeting with Panhandle elected officials, Bush went further, explaining he had “a couple of devious plans” to undo the amendment even if voters passed it. He didn’t realize that a reporter had been in the room until she followed up afterward to ask what he meant.

In the end, Bush won reelection easily, but the class-size amendment also won, narrowly—so narrowly that it might have failed had Bush’s intentions to sabotage it remained secret.

***

The common thread in these episodes is that Bush believed he had worked out a plan to solve a given problem and that the best thing for others to do was stop carping and obstructing and to get in line. Viewed through this lens, dealing with press queries was, on one level, a chore of being a public figure—one of those things you just had to deal with if you wanted to be governor. At the same time, dealing with press queries did not mean they had to be dealt with fully and openly.

I learned this early in his 1998 campaign when I asked about the school vouchers in his education plan. Bush said they were necessary to force public schools to improve and would provide insurance for children who would otherwise be trapped in bad schools. I asked him: Wouldn’t the Florida Constitution, which specifically prohibits public money from flowing to religious institutions, prevent religious schools from participating? Bush responded with a vague laugh that, in that case, voters concerned about the separation of church and state had “nothing to worry about.”

When, after he took office and pushed a plan through the legislature that specifically allowed religious schools to take vouchers, many Floridians—including me—felt misled. By his second term, one voucher program had become three. My reporting showed there was virtually no state oversight over tens of millions of dollars going to these efforts. The majority of voucher schools did not have to participate in standardized testing or even hire licensed teachers.

A colleague at the Post and I surveyed all the voucher-taking schools. We found that most parents chose a particular private school not because they wanted to avoid their neighborhood’s poorly performing public school, but because of the religious instruction their children could get at the voucher school. One story led to another, and the Post became as relentless in its coverage of vouchers as Bush was in pushing them. His office stonewalled our public records requests, with the lengthy delays and the stiff fees that were becoming part and parcel of dealing with his administration.

Bush’s big-picture response was that the parents who received the vouchers knew what was best for their children, and the state shouldn’t impose standards on private schools. He became increasingly testy when challenged. I remember one incident as Bush was pushing the legislature to approve hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a branch of the Scripps Research Institute to Florida. This was shortly after our story showing that most religious schools taking vouchers were not teaching science to state standards, particularly evolutionary biology. I asked whether children who attended such schools should receive the sort of education that would allow them to someday work at Scripps. I didn’t use the word evolution. I didn’t have to.

“That is so loaded. That’s like—you’ve already written the article, why do you want me in it? It’s not fair,” Bush said.

I pressed him: Is that a no?

“No, that’s nothing. That’s no comment. The governor refused to comment. That’s what it is in the article: The governor refused to comment.”

***

Explaining his record or his thinking to doubters isn’t something that Bush has ever really enjoyed. Today, though, as he gears up for a national presidential campaign, he’ll face the toughest questions of his career and also have to explain his own record to voters unfamiliar with who he is beyond the last name.

The recent swing through New Hampshire went well for Bush. His stump speech is getting shorter, tighter, better. Still, it’s in the question-and-answer sessions when he is truly in his element—at least when he can parry questions from worthy adversaries, people who come prepared to do battle with the smartest guy in the room. Party activists, business leaders, even average voters who have come to expect pat answers from candidates are learning that this Bush, anyway, is not typical. Even those predisposed not to like him are impressed by his command of the material and his attention to detail.

At a “ house party” that drew 100 voters and some 75 journalists, one woman asked Bush about community colleges. For the next five minutes, standing between the kitchen island and the stove, Bush expounded on the topic as she nodded patiently. It was a moment any number of Florida reporters could recognize.

David Goldman/AP

The Tampa Bay Times’ Adam Smith, who was also following Bush in New Hampshire, says he was impressed by the former governor’s ability to keep cool, even when he clearly believed the questions were silly. Smith had written earlier that it was only a matter of time before Bush lost his temper and lashed out in one of these settings—and the column drew a quick response from Bush aides. “They were livid,” he says. But in New Hampshire, Bush seemed in complete control. “I think I’d underestimated his tolerance and patience for a giant media scrum, when he’s answering questions that he thinks are beneath him,” Smith says. “He charmed the national press corps pretty effectively.”

In New Hampshire, as in Iowa and other campaign stops, much of the questioning of Jeb Bush, both from the press and the general public, seems to be focused on his positions regarding immigration, where he supports a path to legal status for the millions of people who are in the country illegally, and Common Core, where he supports more rigorous curriculum standards in the nation’s public schools. These views continue to be offered up as proof of Bush’s “moderate” politics. My own unscientific survey of those seeing Bush for the first time suggests that even in the relatively well-informed New Hampshire electorate, voters have only the vaguest idea of Bush’s Florida record—and the national press corps is getting up to speed on him itself, which is another source of irritation for the former governor.

At a media gaggle in Iowa in March, a reporter suggested Bush had changed his views on affording citizenship to illegal immigrants.

“Read my book!” Bush scolded.

The reporter replied that he had.

“Then read the book again, because you misread that part.”

In New Hampshire, I got a chance to ask Bush about defending his accomplishments as Florida’s governor: Did he ever think he’d find himself actually having to prove that he was a conservative?

“We’ll see, we’ll see. I’ve got a pretty good conservative record. At least that’s what the Palm Beach Post used to say,” he told me, and then he laughed. “I kinda yearn for those glory days.”