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WASHINGTON — One month before Jeb Bush was sworn in as governor of Florida, he was already musing about bold plans to reduce the size of the state government.
“One
of our goals should be to have fewer government employees each year we
are serving,” Mr. Bush wrote to two aides in an email in December 1998.
“We need a baseline from which to start. Labor has huge potential to be
reduced, possibly in half.”
The Saturday after he was inaugurated, Mr. Bush forwarded that message to another aide and asked, “Can you make this happen?”
Mr.
Bush — who announced this month that he was “actively exploring” a
presidential bid — left office in 2007 after two terms. In those eight
years, the state government in Tallahassee had been transformed by his
hard-charging and driven style.
And
while he did not slash the number of state employees by half, he did
privatize thousands of public jobs. The email forecasting that move is
one of hundreds of thousands from two accounts — one a government
address, the other personal — sent during his time in office and
obtained by The New York Times through a public records request.
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The
messages illustrate, hour by hour, the business of governing what was
then the country’s fourth most populous state. Often, Mr. Bush is simply
an electronic traffic cop: replying, forwarding and copying a barrage
of pleas for jobs and appointments, visits and routine complaints by
Florida residents.
But
they also showcase Mr. Bush’s aggressive, and personal, approach in
carrying out a conservative agenda in a state that, like others in the
South, had been dominated by Democrats for generations.
He
was the first Republican governor in Florida since Reconstruction to
enjoy a Republican-controlled Legislature, and Mr. Bush used his party’s
newfound strength to cut taxes, carry out sweeping changes in education
policy, eliminate Civil Service protections for state employees and
outsource some functions of state government.
He
was fixated on “big, hairy, audacious goals” — “BHAGs,” as he liked to
say — and could be blunt on what they were and how they could be
achieved.
In
an email to a friend who was close to a teachers’ union leader about
his effort to institute higher-education standards, Mr. Bush instructed
his friend to tell the union leader “that a reformed system will be a
better one for dedicated teachers.”
“I
believe they know this, but they also know that it won’t be so good for
the bottom third of teachers that U.T.D. spends most of its resources
defending,” Mr. Bush said in March 1999, referring to the union, the
United Teachers of Dade.
Mr.
Bush sought this month to get ahead of the anticipated public records
requests, and perhaps score some political points, by announcing in an
interview with a Miami television station that he would voluntarily post
about 250,000 emails on his own website.
“Part of serving or running, both of them, is transparency, to be totally transparent,” Mr. Bush said.
But
Florida’s public information laws are among the most open in the
country, and Mr. Bush knew the messages would be open to public scrutiny
whether he posted them on the website or not. The emails he releases
are likely to include only those publicly accessible under state law,
meaning that messages regarding legal and personnel matters will not be
available.
Mr.
Bush seemed to have been mindful of that eventuality while he was in
office and was careful with his language. But he did occasionally offer
insight into the way he views the world. Responding to a constituent in
October 2000 who wrote him about a motorcycle helmet law, Mr. Bush
offered a glimpse of his conservative philosophy in explaining why he
opposed the measure, saying he did not want to “overextend governments
role in our daily lives.”
“Think
about how many times we could use government to decide what is and is
not healthy or good for us — I am not sure that is the state we want to
live in,” he wrote.
He
was less of a hard-liner, though, when a gay Floridian hoping to win a
job in Mr. Bush’s administration gently asked if his sexual orientation
would present a problem.
“On
the other stuff, don’t ask, don’t tell is fine with me,” Mr. Bush
responded, appropriating the terminology President Bill Clinton used
regarding gays in the military. “What you do in your private life is
your business. If it crosses over into the public policy realm, then
that is another matter. If you are comfortable with that, then we can
proceed.”
Mr.
Bush’s willingness to engage his correspondents even extended to what
may be considered hate mail. When one of them accused him of acting like
a Nazi, the governor responded: “Chill out, John. Do you really believe
my rhetoric is fascist and Nazi like? Take a deep breathe and relax.”
Mr.
Bush’s love of email has long been well known among political
professionals. He is famously accessible to friends, donors,
constituents and reporters via email, and during his time as governor
was quick to adopt what was then the cutting edge of wireless
technology: the BlackBerry.
The
device became so central to his image as a details-obsessed executive
engrossed in a range of policy minutiae, a BlackBerry, sitting in its
charging station, is in the background of his official state portrait.
The BlackBerry allowed him to be in touch whenever he was traveling and to set the parameters of those electronic conversations.
His
awareness of what should and should not be included in the emails is on
display during the 2000 presidential election and the contentious
Florida recount that followed. Mr. Bush fielded hundreds of emails about
the election, but there appear to be no messages to his brother George W. Bush or his father from those public accounts.
With
the recount underway, though, Mr. Bush did express his anger at what he
saw as Democratic attempts to stop his brother from carrying Florida
and winning the election.
“I
am sickened by the ‘second campaign’ now being waged,” he wrote to a
constituent in Port St. Lucie, Fla. “It degrades our great state and
more importantly, does threaten our democracy.”
For all the incoming messages he received, Mr. Bush still expressed occasional wonder about the personal interaction.
After
receiving a message from a self-described “51-year-old white male” who
worked for the State Department of Corrections and who said he had been
discriminated against “many times,” the governor forwarded the note to
aides with a note of his own.
“The
age of direct communication has allowed people to give their opinion to
whomever they like,” he said, “and by God, they do it.”
Steve Kenny, Robert Pear and Derek Willis contributed reporting.
New York's financial regulators
advised health insurers statewide on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014, to cover
transgender treatment deemed to be medically necessary. The state
capitol building in Albany is pictured here. Photo
Credit: Bloomberg News / Ron Antonelli
The 2013 legislation authorizing the
three upstate casinos chosen yesterday also allows Nassau and Suffolk
counties to build gambling parlors with up to 1,000 video slot machines
and table games. Photo Credit: Nancy Borowick
