Swamped
By Dexter Filkins
In Florida, Bush forged a landmark environmental accord—and then exploded it. Credit Illustration by Barry Blitt On the afternoon of December 11, 2000, Jeb Bush, the forty-third governor of Florida and a member of the most dominant American political family since the Kennedys, stood in the Oval Office with President Bill Clinton to mark the signing of a landmark law intended to restore the Everglades, the majestic swamp that spans the interior of southern Florida. The legislation, overwhelmingly approved by both parties, envisioned spending eight billion dollars to revive the wetland, which, thanks in large part to heedless development, had been shrunk, chopped, polluted, and drained to the point of terminal decline. That same afternoon, the Supreme Court was hearing Bush v. Gore, the case that ended the vote-counting dispute in Florida between Clinton’s Vice-President and Jeb’s brother. But, if the occasion was awkward for Bush and Clinton, it marked a seeming triumph of federal and state coöperation. The Everglades legislation was the result of years of coördinated planning. The State of Florida and the federal government had promised to share the expense. “This is the restoration of a treasure for our country,” Bush said after the ceremony.
Less than three years later, Bush returned to Washington, this time to justify to a group of skeptical Republican members of Congress why he was dismantling one of the central provisions of Everglades restoration. Just days before, Florida lawmakers had endorsed a bill to drastically weaken pollution regulations—the result of an extraordinary lobbying blitz by the sugar industry, the largest polluter in the Everglades and one of the largest political donors in the state. Newspaper editorial boards around Florida condemned the proposal as a gift to Big Sugar, the nickname for the major interests in the state: Florida Crystals, U.S. Sugar, and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative. In a private meeting room at the Capitol, the congressmen who had summoned Bush said the bill was so egregious that it could threaten federal funding for the restoration. Bush insisted that he would not change his mind.
In the Presidential primaries, Bush has spoken little about his record on the environment. As he struggles to revitalize his ailing campaign, he has preferred to talk broadly about his experience as governor—an attempt to contrast himself with insurgents like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, and also with Barack Obama, who, even after seven years in the White House, is described by many Republicans as a political neophyte. (The Bush campaign declined to comment for this article.) In a speech following the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Bush announced, “We are living in serious times that require serious leadership.” In a campaign video, recorded in what appears to be a comfortable suburban living room, he presents himself as a tough, decisive manager. “This is what leadership’s about—it’s not just about yapping about things,” he says, as an image of the White House comes on the screen. “We need to start fixing things. I said I was going to do these things, and I did them. And the result was, Florida’s a lot better off.”
What lingers in Florida is the memory of a governor who liked to announce “big, hairy, audacious goals”—often shortened to BHAG, pronounced “bee-hag”—and to pursue them zealously. Much of the time, in a state with natural bipartisan coalitions, it worked. But when it didn’t Bush pushed on, even at the price of gruelling and expensive political conflict. Nowhere was his style more evident than in his protracted struggle with the federal government over the fate of the Everglades—a fight that, according to people in both parties, could well have been avoided with a less autocratic approach. Nathaniel Reed, an Assistant Secretary of the Interior in the Nixon Administration, a friend of President George H. W. Bush, and a prominent Florida environmental activist, told me, “Jeb wouldn’t listen to anyone. He’s the most thin-skinned son of a bitch I’ve seen. If you criticize him, he never forgets it.”
The Everglades—the River of Grass, as it is called—covers nearly four million acres across southern Florida in a slow-moving sheet of water, as wide as fifty miles and, in places, only a few inches deep. The swamp is environmentally unique: home to alligators, panthers, manatees—seventy-seven endangered and threatened species in all, many of them unknown in the rest of the United States. For much of the twentieth century, as Michael Grunwald recounts, in his deeply researched book “The Swamp,” the residents of Florida waged an undeclared war on the Everglades, draining and diverting it to provide more space for development and agriculture. By the nineteen-eighties, the water flow had been so diminished that the wading birds—white ibises, egrets, herons—that had once descended by the thousands to hunt fish, had all but disappeared.
In 1988, Dexter Lehtinen, then the acting U.S. Attorney in southern Florida, sued the state regulatory body that oversaw the Everglades for failing to enforce clean-water laws. The suit was politically brazen: Lehtinen, the husband of a soon-to-be Republican congresswoman and an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, was so sure that he would not get permission from the White House that he brought the suit to court only when Reagan’s term was effectively over. The suit infuriated powerful agricultural interests, but federal officials reluctantly allowed it to go forward. Lehtinen recalled, “They ordered me to withdraw the lawsuit, and I said that would be fine, but that I was going to hold a press conference the same day and it would be on the front page of the Washington Post.”
For almost three years, lawyers representing the State of Florida fought the federal suit. Finally, in 1991, a newly elected governor, Lawton Chiles, showed up at a court hearing in Miami and astonished the audience by capitulating. “We want to surrender,” he said. “I want to find out who I can give my sword to.” The federal-state partnership that resulted would be governed by a consent decree—a legal agreement that ends a dispute without acknowledging fault—and enforced by a United States judge. In 1994, with Chiles leading the way, the Florida legislature passed the Everglades Forever Act, committing the state to reach the clean-water standards set in the decree.
That year, Jeb Bush launched his first campaign for governor. He was not quite a carpetbagger; he had come to Florida to support his father’s 1980 Presidential campaign there, then joined a real-estate and construction firm run by a prominent Miami developer named Armando Codina. But he had few local ties and an undeveloped ear for local politics. In his first campaign, he described himself as a “head-banging conservative,” and paid little attention to environmental concerns. “The environment is a big deal in Florida—every politician learns that sooner or later,” Estus Whitfield, an adviser to half a dozen Florida governors, said. Bush narrowly lost to Chiles. When he ran again, in 1998, he toned down his rhetoric and laid out specific plans to protect the environment. This time, he won.
In 2000, when an ambitious state program to acquire environmentally sensitive land was due to expire, Bush set up another one. It provided three hundred million dollars a year, enabling the state to acquire 1.2 million acres during his tenure, which helped make Florida one of the largest holders of land that is off limits to developers. “That’s big money,” David Guest, a lawyer for the environmentalist group Earthjustice, who often opposed Bush’s administration in court, said.
The Everglades presented a more complex challenge. An environmental restoration like the one in the Everglades has four main components: the quality of the water; the amount of it; the way it is distributed; and the timing of its arrival during the annual cycles of wet and dry weather. By law, only water quality was Florida’s problem exclusively; the other problems were to be addressed by both the state and the federal government. When Bush took office, a multibillion-dollar plan, drawn up by federal and state regulators, was in the works to restore the swamp’s flow. Bush picked up the discussions and, sixteen months later, reached a deal on a landmark law that committed the state to pay for half of the restoration. The bill passed the state legislature unanimously. Congress passed a tandem bill, committing four billion dollars to the initiative, known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan; that was the bill that Bush celebrated in the Oval Office with President Clinton. Terrence (Rock) Salt, a retired senior official with the Army Corps of Engineers who helped oversee the plan’s early phases, credited Bush with securing support and funding for the law, saying, “If not for Jeb Bush, we would not be proceeding with Everglades restoration.”
The swamp’s ecosystem depends on unusually clean water. The main source of pollution is runoff from farms, especially the sprawling sugarcane farms that rim the northern tier of the Everglades. The runoff carries fertilizer rich in phosphorus, which even in tiny amounts can fuel explosions of growth—of algae and, especially, of invasive plants like cattails, which smother native plants and animal life. When Lehtinen sued the state, the levels of phosphorus were high enough to push the ecosystem to the verge of collapse. In Lake Okeechobee, at the northern boundary of the Everglades, algae blooms had become so stifling that huge groups of crawfish and snails crawled out of the water in search of oxygen. Cattails were expanding across the swamp by as much as nine acres every day.
The Everglades Forever Act, the law that Bush inherited from Chiles, divided the cleanup into two phases. The first one called for constructing storm-water treatment areas—artificial wetlands that capture and filter farm run-off—and encouraged farmers to adopt “best management practices,” like refraining from spreading fertilizer just before a rainstorm. By 2003, with the first phase under way, phosphorus levels had dropped dramatically.
The second phase promised to be much more difficult. In 2001, Bush, after consulting with his environmental regulators, had committed the state to an aggressive goal set by the Everglades Forever Act: in five years, phosphorus in the swamp would be reduced to its natural level, no higher than ten parts per billion. Soon afterward, the Audubon Society of Florida sent Bush a letter, saying, “We appreciate your wise and strong support.”
“Sit down, Peter, you can’t object at a funeral.”Buy the print » But in 2003, as Bush began his second term, scientists for the state, along with the sugar industry, concluded that Florida was likely to miss the deadline. Paul Schwiep, a lawyer who represented environmental groups, said, “Everyone started panicking.” The panic had as much to do with money as with science. State regulators had estimated that meeting the deadline would require seven hundred million dollars of additional spending. In the original plan for the cleanup, sugar farmers were required to pay a tax, but ordinary taxpayers bore the bulk of the cost. Florida voters subsequently approved a constitutional amendment requiring polluters—with sugar companies first among them—to pay far more, and, though the amendment was never enforced, it remained on the books.
To get a sense of the ecological challenges facing the Everglades, drive along the top of the levy that encircles the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, a teardrop-shaped enclave on the swamp’s northeastern boundary. Saw grass sweeps to the horizon, in a marshy expanse broken by islands of slash pines and gumbo-limbo trees. The water in the interior of the refuge, accessible only by airboat, is virtually pure; the effects of pollution come into view at the refuge’s fringe, as cattails bloom and the saw grass disappears. As you turn onto the western border, the source of that pollution presents itself: mile after mile of sugarcane fields, with runoff flowing through drainage canals directly into the refuge.
Since the nineteen-sixties, sugar has been a dominant force in Florida agriculture, with several hundred thousand acres ringing the northern reaches of the Everglades. The industry is controlled by a small number of people, principal among them Pepe and Alfy Fanjul, brothers from a Cuban family whose sugar farms were nationalized by Castro after the revolution. The Fanjuls preside over one of the world’s largest sugar empires, including Florida Crystals, which grows and refines sugar on some hundred and fifty thousand acres in the state. Their companies’ revenues, bolstered by federal price supports, have been estimated at five billion dollars a year, and the Fanjuls live in ostentatious luxury. Pepe’s eight-thousand-square-foot Palm Beach mansion is valued at about six million dollars; his yacht, the Azucar (Spanish for “sugar”), is often used for parties and charity events, following the social circuit from Palm Beach to Sag Harbor.
In addition, the Fanjuls own the largest sugar producer in the Dominican Republic, Central Romana, whose holdings also include interests in tourism, manufacturing, and real estate. A resort they own there—Casa de Campo, a seven-thousand-acre estate with its own international airport, polo grounds, and yacht basin—has hosted both Bush Presidents. In January, Hillary and Bill Clinton visited the Fanjuls there.
According to classified American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2011, the State Department blamed Pepe Fanjul and representatives of Central Romana for much of the opposition to a regional free-trade agreement, fearing that it would harm their holdings. Fanjul, one cable said, spread rumors that the United States was revoking visas of those who opposed the trade deal—“a patent absurdity,” the cable said.
Over the years, the Fanjuls’ operations in the United States have been fined numerous times for endangering their workers, most of whom, until the mid-nineties, were brought in from Jamaica and often housed in Third World conditions. In 1992, a Florida judge awarded a group of guest workers fifty-one million dollars, ruling that companies owned by the Fanjuls and others had dramatically underpaid them. (The ruling was overturned on appeal.) Since then, many of the farmworkers have been replaced by machines, which eliminate the potential for abuse but also reduce the number of jobs that sugar creates.
The need to keep federal tariffs in place and pollution standards at bay makes for a potent incentive. “Given the choice between buying a tractor and hiring a lobbyist, the sugar industry is going to hire a lobbyist every time,” Guest, the environmental lawyer, told me. The result is that sugar, despite its relatively limited ability to create jobs, has made itself perhaps the most powerful political force in Florida. Since 1998, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the sugar industry has given at least twenty-one million dollars to Florida candidates, political parties, and PACs. Estus Whitfield, the environmental adviser, said that, after each gubernatorial election, representatives of the industry sit down with the new governor to give him a list of their legislative priorities. “In almost every instance when an Everglades law, rule, or even attitude has changed, it was influenced by the sugar-cane industry,” Whitfield said.
The Fanjuls’ clout in Washington is legendary. Since 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Fanjuls and their relatives have donated nearly four million dollars to federal candidates, parties, and PACs; last year, they spent a million dollars lobbying Congress and other branches of the federal government. The Fanjuls are scrupulously bipartisan; in 2004, Pepe raised more than two hundred thousand dollars for George W. Bush’s reëlection effort, and in 1992 Alfy was the Florida co-chair for Bill Clinton’s campaign. (In one notorious episode, President Clinton received a call from Alfy Fanjul during a tryst with Monica Lewinsky.) When Bush ran for governor in 1998, Florida law limited individual campaign contributions to five hundred dollars a person, and Super PACs were not yet legal. According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the sugar industry contributed only ninety-four hundred dollars to Bush in 1998 and eighty-nine hundred in 2002—but, during those years, it gave three-quarters of a million dollars to the Republican Party of Florida. Close observers of Florida politics say that, even then, the real numbers, for candidates running for statewide office, were much higher than reported, with the industry arranging support from affiliated companies and law firms that it hires. “It’s difficult to pin down, but, for a candidate like Jeb, sugar’s contribution easily approaches a half million dollars,” Bernie Parrish, a longtime lobbyist in Tallahassee, said. (Other veterans of state politics gave me similar estimates.) “As a result, Big Sugar gets what it wants out of the legislature and out of the governor’s office,” Parrish said. “It doesn’t matter who the governor is.”
Halfway through the spring, 2003, session of the Florida House of Representatives, a new bill appeared on the schedule without warning. The legislation proposed to amend the Everglades Forever Act: it pushed back the phosphorus deadlines to 2016, with another extension available after that. Its most lenient provisions allowed the deadlines to be evaded indefinitely; all that was required was that the state and the sugar industry show that they were making their best efforts. “It was basically a license for polluters to keep polluting for years and years,” Don Jodrey, a senior policy adviser at the Department of the Interior, who works on Everglades issues, said. Representatives of the Audubon Society of Florida, who had saluted Bush’s efforts on phosphorus less than two years before, said that they had no idea the legislation was coming. “We were caught completely off guard,” Eric Draper, a lobbyist for the organization who is now its executive director, said. “One hearing, and it was up for a vote.”
A reporter for the Palm Beach Post named Robert King tried to determine who had drafted the bill, but could find no one—in the legislature or in Bush’s administration—who would own up to it. But Bush and his staff appear to have had a hand in it. The bill was introduced two weeks after Bush met privately in his Miami office with Pepe Fanjul, one of Fanjul’s lobbyists, and an executive from U.S. Sugar. According to documents that I obtained from the Florida Department of State, the agenda of the meeting was “phosphorus ruling/polluter pays.”
A lobbyist for U.S. Sugar, Mac Stipanovich, told me that the Governor led a collaboration between his staff and the industry. “Jeb was very active,” he said. “He brought people to the table.” Richard Harvey, the former chief E.P.A. regulator in South Florida, said that the sugar manufacturers had agreed to draft the bill and to move it through the legislature—allowing Bush to remain out of the public glare. “The sugar industry was carrying the ball for Bush,” Harvey, who is now retired, said. “They said, ‘We are going to orchestrate this thing. We are going to get the language we want, and make sure it passes.’ Bush went along.”
David Struhs, Bush’s chief environmental regulator at the time, told me that the legislation shouldn’t have caught anyone by surprise. In 2001, when Bush declared that the new phosphorus limit would be ten parts per billion, he and his environmental team anticipated that they would fail to meet the deadline. In Struhs’s explanation, even if pristine water was flowing into the Everglades, phosphorus from previous years would keep the levels high: “The laws of man, no matter how vigorously enforced, do not trump the laws of nature.” Bush decided on the deadline, anyway, to avoid federal sanction, Struhs told me. “We couldn’t come out and say, ‘We can’t do this,’ ” he said.
Federal and state regulators, as well as environmentalists, argued vigorously that “legacy phosphorus” would not be insurmountable. “We could have met the deadlines, but it would have required a huge effort,” Guest told me. The problem, these people said, was political: the obvious likely solution was to take land being used by the sugar farmers out of cultivation. Struhs told me the industry was terrified that federal regulations would force the farmers to fallow land: “They said, ‘We’re going to be out of business in three years.’ ”
To make sure that the legislation passed, the sugar industry deployed forty-six lobbyists, according to press accounts from the time—more than one for each of the forty senators. Draper, the Audubon Society lobbyist, said that environmentalists had little hope of stopping the bill. When he heard about the legislation, he went to Ron Klein, a Democrat who was the senate minority leader, “to help us stop this thing.” Klein sent him to Screven Watson, the former executive director of the Florida Democratic Party. Watson was also a lobbyist for the sugar industry. “That’s when I knew we were doomed,” Draper said.
In the end, the bill passed the Florida senate unanimously, with the clear understanding that Bush was behind it. “We did this bill because the Governor said it was a good bill,” the senate president, Jim King, said. In the house, a small group of legislators mounted an effort to stop the bill, but they were overwhelmingly defeated. The new law marked such a departure from the original Everglades Forever Act that environmentalists devised a bitter nickname for it: the Everglades Whenever Act.
Buy the print » For Bush, the summons to Washington came even before he had signed the bill. In the ornate, high-ceilinged splendor of Capitol Conference Room H-140, he was met by a group of Republican congressmen, three of them from Florida, who helped oversee federal spending on the Everglades. They wanted to tell him bluntly that the legislation awaiting his signature could explode the partnership between Florida and the federal government.
According to two congressional staffers who attended the meeting, Bush made it clear that he had already decided. “He wasn’t really tolerating any sort of questions,” a former aide said. When the congressmen told Bush that he could be allowing an amount of pollution that would continue to harm the Everglades, he angrily dismissed their concerns. The other staff member said, “I served in government for thirty-four years, twenty on the Appropriations Committee, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone act like that. Bush was angry. He was in my face. He slapped us around. He had absolutely no thought about compromising. I remember thinking, If this guy becomes President, this is not going to work.”
Struhs, Bush’s environmental aide, told me that as the Everglades legislation took shape Bush and his staff consulted with the E.P.A. to make sure that it was legal. “I had a high degree of confidence that the E.P.A. viewed this the same that we did,” he said. But, according to Jodrey, senior officials at the Department of the Interior, which is deeply involved in Everglades oversight, were mortified by the legislation. Jodrey told me his superiors decided that it was necessary to ask President Bush to intercede with his brother. “I was told to write a note in sixth-grade English asking the President to call Jeb,” Jodrey recalled. It’s unclear whether the memo went to the White House, but the President apparently never made the call.
In Miami, though, the judge who oversaw the consent decree summoned state and federal officials to explain themselves. According to Jodrey and Terrence Salt, the former Corps of Engineers official, Justice Department lawyers representing the E.P.A. were ordered not to volunteer any information to the judge. “They were muzzled,” Salt said.
After the hearing, the judge, William Hoeveler, an eighty-year-old senior judge in the Southern District of Florida, released an extraordinary court order, arguing that the law not only potentially violated the consent decree but had been passed in a shamelessly undemocratic way. “The treatment of the bill seemed calculated to avoid federal participation or public scrutiny,” he wrote. As for Bush, he said, “Apparently, he has been misled by people who do not have the best interests of the Everglades at heart.” Hoeveler was so angry that he called several reporters to expand his remarks. When his comments appeared in print, lawyers for the sugar industry pushed to remove him from the case, and he was eventually forced to step aside. Governor Bush was unfazed by the court order. “It is quite an unusual legal statement,” he said. “It didn’t have a lot of law in it.” He signed the Florida legislation a week and a half later.
Two groups sued to block the law’s implementation: a nonprofit called Friends of the Everglades, and the Miccosukee Tribe, Native Americans whose reservation lands sit inside the Everglades. Officials at the E.P.A. are obliged to decide whether local changes in water-quality standards comport with the Clean Water Act. The plaintiffs charged that the regulators, by ruling that Florida’s legislation did not amount to a substantive change in standards, had failed in their duty.
Federal officials say that the new law had been approved in a politically charged atmosphere. Harvey, the E.P.A.’s chief regulator in South Florida, said that when he raised objections he was ignored. Developers seeking permits to build on environmentally sensitive land, he said, were told to bypass him and go to E.P.A. officials in Atlanta, who were appointed by the White House. “You had a Bush in Washington and a Bush in Florida, and together they felt like they could do whatever they wanted,” Harvey said. Salt said that he and his colleagues were ordered not to speak publicly without approval from the Secretary of the Interior. “They absolutely shut us down,” Salt said. “I felt like I was getting squished.”
Federal officials and environmental activists involved in the dispute saw the new legislation as a larger effort by Jeb Bush to cut out the federal government’s role in the Everglades restoration. In 2004, he unveiled a new program to allow Florida to take greater control. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan had produced few results, and Bush blamed the federal government for not providing funds quickly enough. “Unfortunately, Congress did not live up to the promise it made,’’ he wrote in the Miami Herald. In his new plan, called Acceler8, he pledged $1.5 billion to fund eight Everglades infrastructure projects that had been part of the original CERP.
Acceler8 produced a rush of activity but modest results. Several of the projects were beset by delays, corruption, and inflated costs. A pump station in rural Collier County cost $617 million—almost twice what was budgeted. The owner of a hundred and sixty acres of scrubland, designated for flooding, refused to sell; after Bush threatened eminent-domain proceedings to force a sale, the state ended up paying nearly five million dollars. In the end, only two of the eight projects were completed, while the rest were either cancelled or given back to the federal government.
As Acceler8 got under way, Bush asked the federal government to withdraw from the consent decree that set the parameters for the Everglades restoration. The debate went all the way to the office of Gale Norton, the Secretary of the Interior. Ultimately, the department declined to release Florida from the decree. “President Bush refused to call his brother to stop the Everglades bill, but he also refused to give in to his brother’s request,” Jodrey said. “It cut both ways.”
In 2008, four years after the environmentalists and the Miccosukee Tribe sued, a federal judge sided with them in sweeping fashion. Calling the bill “an adroit legislative effort to obscure the obvious,” U.S. District Judge Alan Gold found that the Florida legislature had “violated its fundamental commitment and promise to protect the Everglades.”
The issue remained on hold until 2012, when federal and state regulators, after long negotiations, settled on a revamped plan to clean up the polluted water. Public officials, if not environmental activists, say that they are confident that the Everglades are now back on track. “We are doing very well now,” an official who works on restoration told me. “Charlie Crist? Rick Scott? No problem.”
But federal and state officials of both parties look back on Bush’s administration as a time of stalemate and lost opportunity, largely because Bush derailed the effort to clean up the water in the Everglades for nearly a decade. Under the settlement that resolved the long dispute, the clean-water standard will not need to be met until 2025. The cost of the restoration will be borne primarily by taxpayers, not by the sugar industry. “The goal of Big Sugar is always to put off the day of reckoning,” Draper said.
During the primary campaign, Bush’s few statements about the environment have been carefully tailored to disparate audiences. At a meeting of farmers in Iowa earlier this year, he called the E.P.A. a “pig in slop” and vowed to “rein in” its regulations. This fall, his campaign sent an e-mail inviting conservation leaders to join his advisers in a private conversation. “Jeb Bush values the many contributions environmental and conservation organizations make every day,” it said. “Governor Bush prioritized these issues in Florida when he was Governor and believes they deserve understanding and focus during the important policy debate that will occur in the Presidential election.”
A President who wants to aid the environment without empowering the E.P.A. will need to find an innovative way of enforcing the nation’s ecological rules. When it came to restoring the Everglades, Bush’s efforts to carve out his own path pleased almost no one. It was no surprise that delaying water-quality standards enraged environmentalists. But conservatives have also expressed displeasure with Bush’s environmental record. The Club for Growth and other proponents of smaller government have decried his efforts to buy environmentally sensitive land and to spend taxpayer money to restore the Everglades. And the G.O.P.’s libertarian wing, which sees propping up sugar prices as corporate welfare, was angered by his work on behalf of Big Sugar. Bush has been trying to square the circle. His Super PAC, Right to Rise, received half a million dollars from U.S. Sugar in the first half of this year. But in October his campaign announced that the candidate now favored a “phase-out” of the price-support system.
In April, the Fanjul family hosted a fund-raiser for Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, another candidate for President and, despite his ties to the Tea Party, a staunch backer of price supports for sugar. The cost of entry was twenty-seven hundred dollars a person. And yet it is Bush, for now, who is forced to dispel the assumption that he is beholden to moneyed interests. Asked at one primary debate about the hundred-plus million dollars he has raised so far, he insisted that his donors have given that money only because of his conservative record. In contrast, he pointed to Donald Trump, who, as a contributor to Bush’s gubernatorial campaign, sought permission to bring casinos to Florida. Jeb said that he refused to let him. “I’m not going to be bought by anyone,” he said.
Trump, squinting at the audience, insisted that he would have found a way to get Bush to make a deal on the casino. “I promise I would have gotten it,” he said. ♦
