Bush Spouse Backs Jeb, but Is Wary of Family Business.
Last edited Sat Feb 21, 2015, 11:43 PM - Edit history (1)
For 20 years, Columba Bush anticipated the day she would have to answer one big question: Would she support her husband, Jeb Bush, if he decided to run for president?
Last summer and fall, as she wrestled with whether to say yes, her sense of duty was mixed with dread.
Born in Mexico, she had married into a famously political American family and had always been an outsider: a prayerful Roman Catholic, a sensitive loner and lover of the arts who still speaks in heavily accented English. As Florida’s first lady, she had arranged Mass in the governor’s mansion and endured weeks of bad press for a European shopping spree. She blamed politics for friction in her marriage and as a factor in her daughter’s drug addiction. A run for the White House would expose her to the spotlight as never before. . .
Now, there is a new question confronting Mrs. Bush: What kind of candidate’s wife will she be? In a party looking to soften its image and expand its tent, the prospect of the nation’s first Latina first lady could be a powerful draw for Hispanic voters disenchanted with many Republicans’ hard-line stance on immigration. But Mrs. Bush, 61, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has never been an eager campaigner.
“Jeb is a natural-born politician, but I’m not a political person,” she told The Miami Herald in January 1989, shortly before her father-in-law, George H. W. Bush, became president. “At home, we’re a common, ordinary couple.”
That search for ordinariness has been in conflict with her husband’s yearning for something bigger and the expectations long placed on both of them. Mrs. Bush has struggled to make peace with her husband’s world, but she is the furthest thing from a classic political spouse. If the 2016 election comes down to a choice between Mr. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, she and Bill Clinton would present a startling contrast.
Mrs. Bush cherishes quiet lunches by herself, eating simple Latin fare like jamón serrano at no-frills restaurants or painting in the studio of a friend, the artist Romero Britto, where her last work was of a little cat. When her husband was governor, she preferred spending hours touring women’s shelters and talking to abuse victims rather than highlighting her work against domestic violence to the news media. Her best friend is her sister, Lucila, who married a friend of Mr. Bush’s and lives just a few miles away. . .
Columba Garnica Gallo — known to her friends as Colu, pronounced Coo-loo — was a restless 17-year-old who wanted to explore life beyond León, her bustling hometown, when she met Mr. Bush, an exchange student and academic underachiever from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in 1971.
Little is known about her parents; Mrs. Bush rarely grants interviews and has mostly talked about her mother’s faith and perseverance. But her father, according to some reports, was a migrant worker. They divorced when Mrs. Bush was young, and her mother now lives in Miami. Her father abandoned the family when she was a teenager, according to Mr. Bush’s aides, and she did not have a relationship with him after that.
By all accounts, meeting Columba made Jeb more diligent: When he returned to school, he earned better grades and went on to the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in less than three years. They married in 1974, on a weekend that was also the first time she met her father-in-law. She had met Barbara Bush several weeks earlier. For years afterward, she referred to her mother-in-law as Mrs. Bush.
While Jeb began a business career, Columba had “problems” adjusting to her new life and was in need of “self-confidence,” George H. W. Bush wrote in a diary entry at the time. The couple and their two young children, George and Noelle (Jeb Jr. was born later), moved to Venezuela for a couple of years when Mr. Bush got a job there with a bank, and then settled in Miami, a city with a Latin American culture that delighted Mrs. Bush and presented Mr. Bush with fresh political turf where he could develop his own identity apart from his famous family. . .
While Jeb began a business career, Columba had “problems” adjusting to her new life and was in need of “self-confidence,” George H. W. Bush wrote in a diary entry at the time. The couple and their two young children, George and Noelle (Jeb Jr. was born later), moved to Venezuela for a couple of years when Mr. Bush got a job there with a bank, and then settled in Miami, a city with a Latin American culture that delighted Mrs. Bush and presented Mr. Bush with fresh political turf where he could develop his own identity apart from his famous family.
In 1988, the elder Mr. Bush ran for president, and his daughter-in-law got a painful introduction to national politics. Mrs. Bush, who became an American citizen so she could vote that November, later said she had found herself “trembling” after he referred in public to her children as “the little brown ones.” While she moved quickly to defend Mr. Bush, describing his reference as a term of endearment, the phrase hung over the children and their mother for years.
“Columba is very sweet, very polite, very reserved, and politics isn’t known for any of that,” said former Gov. Bob Martinez of Florida, a Republican who made Mr. Bush his secretary of commerce in the late 1980s.
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