Well, the push for Bush is starting up. Get a whiff of
the Washington Post's PR campaign...
Ana Navarro, a GOP strategist who worked in Bush’s administration, said that it was “not uncommon to get e-mails at the wee hours of the morning when only Jeb and roosters are up.”
Bush frequently responded to Floridians who e-mailed him directly with advice or concerns. He quickly wrote back to a woman who inquired about his wife’s birthday with the exact date.
When a man wrote the Florida governor to complain that he had become entangled in a messy domestic struggle between friends — “what should have been a messy divorce, seems to have turned into a criminal matter; with me in the middle,” the man complained — Bush forwarded the note to a staffer and asked her to look into it.
To a man who wrote “politicians make me sick, you make me sick,” Bush replied: “I am truly sorry you feel that way. Have a nice day,” adding a smiley face.
He regularly sought to calm conservative activists who wanted him to take the government further to the right.
Although being a hands-on governor kept Jeb very busy, he always had time to take telephone calls from junior high school students in need of help with their algebra homework.
Then there was the time he met a young blind girl begging by the side of the road. Deeply moved, he kissed her on the forehead, and three weeks later her vision started to return.
I'm sure that everyone recalls the wartime incident when his boat was torpedoed by the Japanese. When the hull began to sink, Jeb saved the life of an injured crewman under his command. The future president swam to an island more than three miles away, and he towed the crewman along by holding the strap of the man's lifejacket between his teeth.
As every film buff knows, Jeb's screenplay for
All About Eve contains some of the most scintillating dialogue ever heard in a motion picture. And I'm sure that all classical music aficionados are familiar with his legendary rendition of the
Liebstod, as heard in the classic Karl Boehm recording of Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde.
I still haven't figured out how he survived that fall from the roof of St. Bart's Hospital. Do
you have any theories...?
(Feel free to share your own memories of Jeb Bush in the comments. After all...tomorrow is his birthday!)