By Dee Longfellow
For The Elmhurst Independent
A few people were biting their nails and pacing the floor on Tuesday, April 17, after learning political matriarch Barbara Bush had passed away on that day at the age of 92. The concern was that with Mrs. Bush’s death, her son Jeb Bush might cancel his plans to be the keynote speaker at the Elmhurst College Governmental Forum that took place on Wednesday, April 18. Many people made phone calls and sent text messages the night before to see what was going on, but all they really needed to do was visit the Elmhurst College web site to learn that the former Florida governor would indeed keep his commitment and turn out to address the 700 people gathered at the Oak Brook Hills Hotel.
At the event, Bush offered a no-nonsense explanation.
“Believe me, my mother would want me to keep my obligation to Elmhurst College and the 700 guests attending this Forum,” he explained. “In fact, she would have been angry if I had passed on coming to this event.”
Lee Daniels, former House Speaker and senior advisor to Elmhurst College president Troy VanAken, was the chief organizer of the College’s 11th Annual Governmental Forum, entitled “Leadership in a Changing World: A Conversation with Governor Jeb Bush.” After his own welcome that included a salute to the sponsors and recognition of others responsible for the event, Daniels made the introduction of Bush, saying he had no doubt he would keep his commitment to the event.
“His mother was the type of person that, if you broke an obligation, you were in real trouble,” said Daniels.
Bush talked about his mother and her legacy, including telling a little joke about those who praised her.
His mother and her legacy
“People sometimes come up to me and say, ‘you know, I just love your mother,’ and that was code for ‘I’m a Democrat and I can’t stand you,’” he said, drawing a laugh from the audience. “My dad’s really struggling right now, he held her hand all day yesterday (Tuesday). I talked to him after she passed and he said, ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit of a crybaby today.’”
Bush said his father was physically in better shape than he was about a month ago, but that he was “in and out, mentally.”
“If I ever talked and used the language like some of the politicians in this day and age, [my mother] would have ‘whipped my butt,’” he said, “and, occasionally, she did it anyway! My mother was my first teacher. Mom and Dad taught us right from wrong, taught us to serve others, to be civil and above all else, love your family. They acted on their love for 75 years.”
Following about a 30-minute address by Bush, he sat down for a conversation with R. Bruce Dold, publisher and Editor-in-Chief for the Chicago Tribune.
The quest to sustain quality education
Bush serves as Chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, clearly following in his mother’s footsteps in that she was such an advocate for education. In fact, he said his message during the 2016 presidential race was to push quality education – a subject Bush was rarely allowed to address due to the direction the debates typically took.
“If you look at how political it got, what I saw was that we were missing the opportunity to fix what needed to be fixed,” he said. “People don’t see the future as bright as they used to. Our parents’ [generation] raised their children to do better than they did and most of us were able to do that. Today, it may not be the same. People feel their children may have less opportunity than they did.”
He said upward mobility has been cut in half. In the 1920s, children could expect to do 85% as well as their parents did, but in the 1980s, the next generation could do about 50% better than the prior. Bush added that the workers’ skills gap was growing.
“While the high school graduation rate is at 83% right now, of those only 37% are truly prepared for college. One out of every five students who attend a public university will have to retake math. At a community college, it can be as much as 50%.
“We do have more and more kids taking AP (advanced placement) classes in our high schools, so we’re moving the needle, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Think differently, modernize the message
Bush said that while we have this skills gap, we have to organize ourselves in a “radically different” way. He said we haven’t modernized our message so we can be relative to 2080, not the 1980s.
“As conservatives, we’ve lost our ability to communicate about conservatism. We’re still holding on to what we’ve had and we’re not pushing forward. We have to think differently, we’re fooling ourselves if we think we can sustain things as they are. This country has done it before during tough times and we can do it again.”
He referred to the “poisonous political climate” today and how we have become “hyper-partisan.”
Bush urged the audience to “resist fake news.”
“To do that, we have to force ourselves to acquire news from various sources. It’s easy to listen to those who validate our own values, but we need to get the other side of the story.”
He recalled how Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill had once set aside their differences in order to save social security.
“Good people can have differences of opinion. We need to find enough consensus to move forward.”
Elmhurst College President Troy & Annette VanAken greet Jeb Bush (right), the invited presenter to this year’s Elmhurst College Governmental Forum, which took place at Oak Brook Hills Hotel in Wednesday, April 18. There was concern that the former two-term Florida Governor might cancel due to the death of his mother Barbara Bush just the day before, but he assured the crowd that his mother would have wanted him to be there. In fact, “she would never forgive me if I didn’t keep this obligation,” he said.
Gracious reference to current president
Overall, Bush was impressive and gracious, even with the occasional mention of the current president who did his best to humiliate Bush (as well as all the other candidates) in the 2016 presidential primary.
While he didn’t directly put down the president, Bush hinted that he recognized the flaws of the current White House resident, calling him the “chaos president,” – he’s getting things done via chaos.
“The swamp is still there, and things are not getting any less swampy!”
Bush ended on a positive note.
“It takes courage to govern. This is still the best country on earth. We’re all good people.”
