The Latest Disappointment from Jeb Bush: Endorsement of Ron DeSantis

In 2015, I was an early supporter of Jeb Bush’s bid for the presidency. My support for Bush waned and ultimately disappeared, a casualty of his stumbling campaign and a series of self-inflicted wounds. Since then, relatively little has been heard from Bush, but he recently declared his support for Governor Ron DeSantis. It is hardly breaking news that “politics makes strange bedfellows,” but this latest example merits at least the raising of an eyebrow.

Jonathan V. Last, writing in Triad, offered this analysis:

Jeb’s governorship was so radically different from DeSantis’s that there are only really three possibilities here:

(a) Jeb contemporaneously viewed his own record in office as a failure.

(b) Jeb once viewed his record as successful, but has since repudiated that view of his policies.

Or

(c) Jeb does not actually mean it when he now says he believes that DeSantis is a good governor who has made Florida a model for the rest of the country.

Among the many differences between the Bush and DeSantis governorships, none may be more significant than their respective approaches to education. Bush had a national reputation as a leader in the movement for education reform. DeSantis’s approach, however, has been driven by ideology. Writing in the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin observed that:

The Florida governor seems to view schools as the battleground for his war on inclusivity and truth. Whether it is DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” law or his vendetta against African American and gender studies, his obsession with telling teachers what they cannot teach far outweighs his concern for how students are performing.

And as it turns out, that performance is pretty lousy.

While Florida officials — including DeSantis — have boasted about the state’s relatively high proficiency scores among fourth-graders, they have largely ignored how quickly those scores drop as students grow older. As education journalist Billy Townsend writes in an opinion piece for the Tampa Bay Times, “No other state comes close to Florida’s level of consistent fourth to eighth grade performance collapse.”

It may be that Bush’s favorable view of DeSantis stems from the latter’s apparent role as Donald Trump’s most formidable rival for 2024. Bush has ample grounds, both political and personal, for antipathy to Trump. In 2016, Trump’s attacks on Bush (“low energy”), and Bush’s inability to respond effectively, were fatal to his candidacy. It was a surprising, even shocking, end for someone who, only months before, had been viewed as the front-runner.

Nevertheless, while my own antipathy to The Former Guy is boundless, I cannot convert it into enthusiasm for DeSantis, about whom more will be said in future posts.