Jeb Bush Was A Romney-Type Bully In School–Why It Might Still Matter

The Boston Globe looked at Jeb Bush’s school days, finding he abused drugs like his brother and was a bully like the last Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

Resolutely apolitical despite his lineage, he refused to join the Progressive Andover Republicans club and often declined even to participate in informal bull sessions with classmates. In a tumultuous season in American life, he seemed to his peers strangely detached and indifferent.

“He was just in a bit of a different world,” said Phil Sylvester, who said he was a Bush roommate. While other students “were constantly arguing about politics and particularly Vietnam, he just wasn’t interested, he didn’t participate, he didn’t care.”

Meanwhile, his grades were so poor that he was in danger of being expelled, which would have been a huge embarrassment to his father, a member of Congress and of the school’s board of trustees.

Bush, in an interview for this story, recalled it as one of the most difficult times of his life, while acknowledging that he made it harder by initially breaking a series of rules.

“I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover,” Bush said, both of which could have led to expulsion. “It was pretty common.” He said he had no recollection of bullying and said he was surprised to be perceived that way by some…

One of those who did get to know Bush in these early days was Peter Tibbetts. The connection, he said, was pot. The first time Tibbetts smoked marijuana, he said, was with Bush and a few other classmates in the woods near Pemberton Cottage. Then, a few weeks later, Tibbetts said he smoked hashish — a cannabis product typically stronger than pot — in Jeb’s dormitory room…

Tibbetts, who was eventually forced to leave Andover in the spring of 1970 after school officials accused him of using drugs, said his one regret about his relationship with Bush is that he agreed to participate with him in the bullying of a student in the dormitory. Their target was a short classmate whom they taunted, and then sewed his pajama bottoms so that they were impossible to put on. The act was particularly embarrassing, said Tibbetts, who said he felt remorse for joining in with “kids being cruel.”

James Joyner has a point in questioning the meaning of such stories from long ago:

 …Bush turns 62 in a few days. He’s spent almost the entirety of his adult life in the public eye, including eight years as governor of one of our largest states. Surely, that’s a better frame of reference on his character and suitability for the presidency than whatever he did or didn’t do as a young teenager away from home for the first time?

However character does matter, and behavior at an early age might be relevant to predicting later behavior. Mitt Romney did turn out to be a dishonest, unethical adult who was morally unfit to be president. Perhaps the early stories of his bullying were predictive of his character.

Jeb Bush’s career in public life also does raise some questions about character. While not the same situation as the bullying described by The Boston Globe, Politico also has a story this weekend which includes questions regarding Bush’s character:

Sitting recently on his brick back patio here, Michael Schiavo called Jeb Bush a vindictive, untrustworthy coward.

 For years, the self-described “average Joe” felt harassed, targeted and tormented by the most important person in the state.

“It was a living hell,” he said, “and I blame him.”

 Michael Schiavo was the husband of Terri Schiavo, the brain-dead woman from the Tampa Bay area who ended up at the center of one of the most contentious, drawn-out conflicts in the history of America’s culture wars. The fight over her death lasted almost a decade. It started as a private legal back-and-forth between her husband and her parents. Before it ended, it moved from circuit courts to district courts to state courts to federal courts, to the U.S. Supreme Court, from the state legislature in Tallahassee to Congress in Washington. The president got involved. So did the pope.

But it never would have become what it became if not for the dogged intervention of the governor of Florida at the time, the second son of the 41st president, the younger brother of the 43rd, the man who sits near the top of the extended early list of likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates. On sustained, concentrated display, seen in thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of emails he sent, was Jeb the converted Catholic, Jeb the pro-life conservative, Jeb the hands-on workaholic, Jeb the all-hours emailer—confident, competitive, powerful, obstinate Jeb. Longtime watchers of John Ellis Bush say what he did throughout the Terri Schiavo case demonstrates how he would operate in the Oval Office. They say it’s the Jebbest thing Jeb’s ever done.

The case showed he “will pursue whatever he thinks is right, virtually forever,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. “It’s a theme of Jeb’s governorship: He really pushed executive power to the limits.”

“If you want to understand Jeb Bush, he’s guided by principle over convenience,” said Dennis Baxley, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives during Bush’s governorship and still. “He may be wrong about something, but he knows what he believes.”

The last line describes Bush as being the opposite of Mitt Romney, but equally wrong. Mitt Romney showed in public life that he had no principles, willing to say or do anything which would help him politically. He changed positions whenever expedient, and lied so frequently in his presidential campaign that he made Richard Nixon look almost like a saint in comparison. Examples of Mitt’s legendary mendacity can be found here and here. Perhaps Romney thought that being a man of religion precluded him from being an unethical person, regardless of his actual conduct. 

In contrast to Romney’s lack of principles, the Terri Schiavo case suggests that Bush has principles and is willing to abuse the power of the state to impose his warped and immoral values upon others. Political power turns a bully like Jeb Bush into a far more dangerous bully.

1 Comment

  1. 1
    Ray says:

    This is all covered under the heading of; Once an entitled A$$hole always an entitled A$$hole.

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