Expect former Gov. Jeb Bush to talk about his family at the anticipated announcement this morning that he is running for president.
Not just his famous father and brother, who have already served their own stints as the leader of the free world, but his Mexican wife who ultimately is what brought him to Miami and who gives him street cred as a Hispanic-through-osmosis candidate.
Expect him to talk about the greatness of America and to use the words “rising up” — from his political action committee — as a pitch for his presidency’s potential prosperity. Expect him to talk about the middle class, as if the Ivy League millionaire was one of them. Expect him to talk about Cuba and how wrong it is for the current administration to be reaching out to a dictatorship guilty of murder.
He may bring up immigration. He’s had some tough push back from the hard right on his soft stance that some say is not truly conservative. But this is a friendly enough crowd.
He may bring up education. He is, after all, the father of school vouchers and the charter school cottage industry in Florida and he has the backdrop of a very successful and beloved college campus. In fact, Ladra expects some anecdotal story from the campus or about Miami Dade College from his steeped-in-the-305 past, possibly from when it was Miami-Dade Community College. He might even name drop MDC President Eduardo Padron, who is a local hero.
But don’t expect him to bring up Common Core, the very controversial math and English Language Arts standards that originally grew out of the bipartisan National Governors Association, but is now called “ObamaCore” by many conservatives and that high-performing Cuban voters over 50 — Republican and Democrat — liken to socialist indoctrination. While he was its earliest and most enthusiastic champion last year, je can’t bring it up now. Politico wrote that observers call Common Core Jeb’s number one problem. Don’t expect him to tell the crowd that he refused to raise education spending or cap the classroom size.
Likewise, he may talk about being a businessman, but don’t expect him to bring up the $4 million federal bailout he got for a loan from the Broward Federal Savings & Loan in the mid 80s. An investor named J. Edward Houston actually took out the $4.565 loan as a second mortgage to purchase a building on Brickell Avenue. After Houston declared bankruptcy, Bush and his real estate partner and mentor, Armando Codina, were let off the hook for all but about $500,000. They got to keep the building paying only the $7 million first mortgage.
And Bush probably won’t say, outright, “I want to be very wealthy,” as he did to the Miami News in 1983. Maybe because he already is. He gets points for losing money while sitting in the governor’s mansion, when his net worth reportedly went from $2 million to $1.3 million. But he’s gotten to the $10 million mark in seven short years since leaving office in 2007 — raking in millions from $50,000-a-pop speeches and sitting on boards of corporations who were likely buying access to a possible future president.
Among those is the for-profit hospital chain called Tenet Healthcare, which he
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