Friends and former advisers say Bush was torn over whether to run for Senate in Florida in 2010. He opted instead to support Marco Rubio for the seat. As 2012 approached, he seriously mulled the presidency. Donors and former aides urged him to consider. He was again torn. People close to Bush describe several factors that dissuaded him, including a desire to make more money. But the major reason was the unwillingness, or inability, of his wife to be a political partner. Columba Bush, long and awkward presence in the Bush family, speaks English haltingly and has rarely joined her husband on political stages. When Jeb became governor, she spent less time in the capital of Tallahassee than she did in their home near Miami, where the family, including Jeb, all spoke Spanish. Signs of trouble first emerged in 1999 when she went on a five-day Parisian shopping trip and bought $19,000 worth of clothes and jewelry and tried declaring only $500 at Customs (to hide the expenditures from her husband, she said). After the ensuing media debacle, she was kept out of sight. “My wife is not a public person,” Bush said at the time. “She is uncomfortable with the limelight, which is why I love her. I don’t want a political wife—I want someone who when I get home I can have a normal life with.”
But things were far from normal. In 2002, their daughter Noelle, then 24, was arrested for prescription fraud—the first of a series of problems that would continue beyond Jeb’s governorship. “The Noelle issue has taken an incredible toll on both of them,” says a friend in Florida.
But then there was the obvious: People simply weren’t prepared for another Bush in the White House. As Jeb negotiated the right wing of his party in a primary circus, the media hot lamps of a presidential race would be trained on his ailing father, his reclusive brother, his own troubled family. No matter the weakness in the Republican field; it would take more time for the House of Bush to get back in order.
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