Son king: further confirmation that the wrong Bush brother was elected president.

• Author: Longman, Phillip
• Position: Jeb: America's Next Bush - Book review

Jeb: America's Next Bush By S. V. Date $26.95, Penguin

"No tengo futuro," Jeb Bush told Spanish-language reporters last December. Word that Florida's popular two-term governor sees himself as having no political future is hardly surprising. Jeb may be the smart one, the one who's deeply curious and involved with the mechanics of government, the one whose poll ratings as he leaves office show that 57 percent of Floridians believe he was a good, even a great, governor. But he's also a Bush, and whatever advantages that patrimony may have given him throughout most of his fife, it's a huge political liability now. True, just maybe his older brother will miraculously deliver "peace with honor" in the next few months. But I think not.

So, is there any reason to read Feb, S. V. Date's 370-page profile of the man he warns will become "America's Next Bush?" Well, maybe if you closely follow Florida politics, and since 2000 we all know just how important Florida politics can be for the rest of us. And maybe if you believe, as the book's dust jacket assures us, that John McCain has discussed running Jeb as his vice president in 2008, or the recent reports that Mitt Romney wants to do the same. Finally, if you're a policy wonk looking to study how ideas like school vouchers, standardized testing, and privatization play out in the real world, this book will provide many examples. For however wrongheaded many of his policies may have been, Jeb Bush was an active and innovative governor of a bellwether state.

But that still leaves us with the problem of the unreliable narrator. Before I picked up this book, my opinions about Jeb Bush were hardly favorable. In the 1998 Florida gubernatorial race he defeated the thinking man's choice, Democrat Buddy MacKay--a man I once worked for in the 1980s while he was in Congress and whom I still hold in high regard. After years of later working as a reporter and editor for the state's leading business and public affairs magazine, Florida Trend (owned by the liberal St. Petersburg Times), I also saw Jeb as wrong on many issues. And of course, like most Americans of all political stripes, I'm fed up and angry these days with all things Bush. But as I set this book down, I found myself not persuaded by Date's claim that Jeb is a potential dictator poised and ready to enslave America.

Date, who covered and clashed with Bush for seven years as a reporter for the Palm Beach Post, makes no pretext of neutrality. That's okay...