Phil Ammann
In the summer and fall of this past year, Columba Bush wrestled with the question all of America is asking now: Will her husband — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — run for president in 2016?
And if so, would she support him?
As a member of an American political dynasty, Columba faced a dilemma — a sense of duty to her husband and adopted country mixed with an undercurrent of dread for what the future holds for the third Bush to seek the Oval Office.
In a profile by Patrick Healy and Sheryl Gay Stolberg in The New York Times, Columba Bush, born in Mexico and a devout Roman Catholic, has always been somewhat of an outsider in the Bush clan, a loner and patron of the arts. During her time as first lady of Florida, she had Mass held in the governor’s mansion and received blistering press scrutiny for a European shopping binge.
Politics added stress to her marriage and was the source, in part, of her daughter’s drug addiction.
Imagine what the magnifying glass of the presidential campaign would bring.
“She knows the good and the bad of being around politics,” said Jim Towey, a close friend of the Bushes who served in the George W. Bush White House.
“It’s opened the door to extraordinary experiences for her. But she’s paid quite a price, as well,” Towey told the Times.
During a vacation in Mexico this past Thanksgiving, friends say Columba Bush gave her approval, but not before the promise that her husband will spend time every week with her, their children and grandchildren.
Now that she has given her consent, new questions arise about exactly what type of candidate’s wife Columba will be. With the possibility of becoming America’s first Latina first lady, she could become a symbol for Republicans outreach efforts, and a powerful attraction to Hispanics turned off by the GOP hard-line stance on immigration.
“Jeb is a natural-born politician,” she told The Miami Herald in 1989, shortly before George H.W. Bush, Columba’s father-in-law, became president, “but I’m not a political person. At home, we’re a common, ordinary couple.”
For Bush, it was striking a constant balance: her husband’s political ambitions versus the expectations that come from the journey.
Columba struggled to accept her husband’s world, without falling into the stereotype of a political spouse.
If the presidential race in 2016 becomes a contest between Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the contrast between Columba Bush and Bill Clinton could not be stronger.
As Healy and Stolberg write:
Mrs. Bush cherishes quiet lunches by herself, eating simple Latin fare like jamón serrano at no-frills restaurants … 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.
In 1988, when George H.W. Bush ran for president, his daughter-in-law first received the shock of national politics, “trembling” after he called her children “little brown ones,” a phrase that lingered for years with her.
“Columba is very sweet, very polite, very reserved, and politics isn’t known for any of that,” Republican former Gov. Bob Martinez told the Times. In the late 1980s, Jeb Bush was Martinez’s secretary of commerce.
When Jeb Bush left office in 2007, “Columba really did retreat back to her world in Miami, with the arts and her family,” Towey said.
Now that several years have passed, Columba has relaxed (somewhat) her anxieties over a White House run. Her primary concern is their daughter Noelle, who had previously struggled with drugs, and now works for a software business in Orlando.
Bush confidants think Columba will take part in the campaign, particularly on issues important to her: domestic violence and Latin American culture. She shares views on immigration with her husband — reforming immigration laws — but is less clear on matters such as border security and citizenship opportunities for undocumented immigrants.
As for her husband’s future in politics, Columba Bush says he has a “calling.”
“I am a firm believer in destiny,” she said in a rare 1991 Spanish-language interview for Miami’s Selecta Magazine. “I feel that what is important is written, and you do what you do.”
