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Bush Camp Supports Romney Ronald Kessler When former Bush White House aides ask Karl Rove for guidance on where to throw their support in the next presidential election, he tells them President Bush is neutral about the candidates. But Bush family members, friends, and key supporters are solidly behind Mitt Romney. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has quietly given his blessing to key staffers to migrate to the Romney camp, Sally Bradshaw, who was Jeb's staff director and is now working for Romney, told me. There are some striking similarities between George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Both are sons of presidential candidates. Both are multimillionaires who made their money as highly successful businessmen. Both were state governors. Bizarrely, both Romney and Bush were on male cheerleading squads in high school — Romney at the private Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Bush at the private Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass. Both were high school pranksters. Both men were in the class of 1975 at Harvard Business School and vaguely knew each other. However, as part of a joint program, Romney also obtained a law degree from Harvard Law School. Both men's lives have been touched by fatal car accidents. When he was a Mormon missionary in France in the summer of 1968, Romney, 21, was driving a Citroën in the rain on a mountainous road near Bordeaux with five other missionaries. As they rounded a curve, a Mercedes, possibly passing another car, veered over the median. The Mercedes slammed almost head on into Romney's car at what police said was 70 mph. Viola Anderson, the wife of his mission president, suffered crushed lungs and died. Thrown from the car, the future governor of Massachusetts suffered a broken arm.
Story Continues Below
In November 1963, when she was a senior in high school in Midland, Texas, Laura Bush, then 17, was driving on a dark country road with a high school friend when she missed a stop sign. Her parents' brand-new Chevrolet Impala slammed into a 1962 Corvair sedan driven by Michael D. Douglas, another high school friend, who was thrown from his car. He died at the scene. Both Romney and Bush are deeply religious. Neither man drinks: Bush gave it up because it was impinging on his personal and professional life. Romney never took a drink because of his Mormon beliefs.
Bush and Romney are different in one major respect: their facility with the English language. Romney is the most articulate presidential candidate in modern times. He speaks in complete sentences and paragraphs, and his speech flows as smoothly and effortlessly as maple syrup. Bush is the first to poke fun at his own malapropisms. Before speaking at a Radio and Television Correspondents dinner, Bush told his high school friend and aide Clay Johnson III, "I'm going to give the funniest speech you've ever heard. They have this tape of ridiculous phrases I used in the campaign. I can't believe that a candidate for president said those things." At the dinner, Bush said, "This is my most famous statement: ‘Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning.'" Those Jeb Bush allies joining the Romney team, along with Sally Bradshaw, include Ann Herberger, who was Jeb's campaign finance director; former House Speaker Allan Bense; former Florida Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings; U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney, who was his running mate in the 1994 election he lost; his former press secretary Kristy Campbell; and former state Republican Chairmen Van Poole and Al Cardenas.
Democrats Pave the Way for Union Intimidation
In the past 25 years, union membership in America has dwindled from 21 percent of all workers to 12 percent. What to do? The Democrats have a solution that promises to touch off one of the biggest fights in Congress this year. With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leading the way, they are pushing passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. If the Federal Trade Commission could regulate Congress the way it regulates advertising, it would ban the name of the bill as deceptive. In fact, the measure — also known as card check — would not give workers free choice. Instead, it would repeal the current law that says workers must be allowed to choose whether they want union representation through an election using secret ballots. Under card check, a union would have the right to represent workers at a facility if it can get a majority of the workers to publicly sign a card indicating they support the union. Of course, there is a reason Congress made it clear in 1947 that secret ballots must be used. Otherwise, union representatives can intimidate workers who refuse to go along with bringing in a union. In a recent poll, 58 percent of workers said they would not want to join a union. But if the card check bill passes, union membership and therefore contributions to the Democrats from union PACS will rise dramatically. Underscoring the importance of the measure, the AFL-CIO has been running full-page ads in newspapers touting the proposed legislation. The ads list the deceptive name given to the act by the Democrats, but they give no hint of what the Employee Free Choice Act would actually do. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, predicts that if the bill is enacted, Democrats will be able to "retain power in Congress for the next 50 years."
Undermining the War on Terror With Democrats holding hearings to try to embarrass the Bush administration, FBI and CIA officials worry about the amount of time they have to devote to testifying on Capitol Hill and the number of people they have to divert from tracking terrorists to locating documents for hearings. As it is, people at both agencies work night and day to prevent the next terrorist attack. Diverting personnel from hunting down terrorists who are determined to detonate a nuclear device in the United States so that Democrats can assess blame for intelligence failures that have since been addressed is not the way to win the war on terror. Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of NewsMax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you FREE via e-mail. Go Here Now.
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