Ryan Ray
Jeb Bush‘s political team is headed up by North Florida’s own Sally Bradshaw, who as Jason Horowitz writes in the New York Times is no stranger to the terrain:
If Karl Rove was known as the charismatic George W. Bush’s brain, Ms. Bradshaw is the brainier Bush’s muscle. As Jeb Bush’s facilitator, enforcer and sounding board for 20 years, Ms. Bradshaw does the political trench work that allows her boss to keep his head in the policy clouds.
Just last week, the woman Mr. Bush called his “closest adviser for the entirety of my political career,” helped drive Mitt Romney, for whom she once worked, out of the race by poaching his former Iowa director — all part of her mission to recruit top talent, raise millions of dollars and direct the policy rollout of the quickly evolving Bush campaign.
A chicken farmer in her Gadsden County home, Bradshaw knows, however, that sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. The seasoned political pro her husband Paul Bradshaw of Southern Strategy Group likens to a “titanium magnolia” didn’t get where she was on down-home-in-Dixie charm alone:
… Ms. Bradshaw’s propinquity to Mr. Bush, and the power she wields as a result of it, has also attracted a fair share of hard feelings. Her sparring with other Bush aides has created drama. Some Florida lobbyists grumble about her husband’s lucrative lobbying firm, Southern Strategy Group, the founding and rapid expansion of which coincided with Mr. Bush’s election as governor. And the consummate staffer has at times also emerged as a source of tension in Mr. Bush’s family.
Before Mr. Bush’s run for governor in 1998, he and his wife, Columba, were joined by Ms. Bradshaw and other campaign aides on a visit with Mr. Bush’s father and mother at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Me. During the visit, Columba Bush questioned the amount of time Ms. Bradshaw was spending with her husband, according to people with knowledge of the meeting who requested anonymity to avoid angering Mr. Bush and Ms. Bradshaw.
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The moment of tension passed and Ms. Bradshaw remained Mr. Bush’s top adviser. And now the couple has entrusted Ms. Bradshaw to bring them to Washington.
After an unsuccessful presidential cycle working as a top-level aide for former Mississippi Governor Hayley Barbour and then Mitt Romney, she scored a major coup this month when her erstwhile boss Romney pulled out of the race in deference to Jeb. For Bradshaw, a massive feat such as that is not a goal, merely a means:
She’s hardly finished. Wayne Berman, a Republican bundler who is committed to Senator Marco Rubio, said that he has had several “lovely conversations” with Ms. Bradshaw, who he considers a remarkable political talent. Mr. Rubio will probably soon decide if he will run for president or for re-election, in which case his donors will be newly available to Mr. Bush. “People who are committed to other candidates trust Sally,” Mr. Berman said.
As Ms. Bradshaw accompanied her boss around the country, her husband was back at the farm explaining how he had helped conserve the Olandsk Dwarfs, of which he said, “There were once 54 of them left in the world.” He insisted that his wife was “interested” in the chickens but allowed that a Bush candidacy might have a greater claim on her imagination.
