A Kid Brother Gets in Trouble

It's hard in Florida in a campaign containing a Bush not to be drawn back to the 2000 election, when presidential candidate George W. Bush needed Governor Jeb Bush to safely deliver the state. He famously couldn't, and Bush had to be towed across the finish line by the Supreme Court. Now it's Jeb who needs rescuing in an unexpectedly tight race for re-election against political neophyte Bill McBride, and Big Brother George is doing everything he can to help him, short of commuting to work there. He has made 11 trips (a 12th is planned for this week), helped raise at least $6 million (Bush is spending $30 million to McBride's $10 million) and directed millions more in federal pork toward Tallahassee. He has deployed a parade of Cabinet Secretaries as well as Dad and Mom, who produced a Kodak moment at last week's debate when she hugged former Attorney General Janet Reno, the opponent Jeb dearly wished to have.

Despite the high-caliber help, Jeb finds himself in a statistical dead heat with McBride, a former Marine with a Bronze Star and a folksy manner who gave up a student deferment to go to Vietnam. Last year, when he found himself "screaming at the TV set, frustrated" at where the state was headed, McBride quit his post as managing partner of Holland & Knight, which he had built into the fifth largest law firm in the U.S. (his wife was once head of Bank of America in Florida), and launched his long-shot bid for Governor. McBride dresses like Columbo and campaigns like the late Governor Lawton Chiles, a Democrat who appealed to Republicans by walking the state and calling himself a cracker.

McBride has made education the centerpiece of his campaign and vigorously supports a referendum, expected to pass, that would reduce class size. In a tax-phobic state, McBride has proposed a 50¢-a-pack cigarette tax and unspecified spending cuts to pay for the school initiative. Bush, on the grounds that he doesn't support the referendum, offers no clue as to how he would pay for it should the measure pass. He had to apologize after he confided to concerned Republican lawmakers, unaware a reporter was present, that he had a "couple of devious plans" to thwart the proposal should it pass.

Jeb is more like Al Gore than he is like his easygoing brother. The Governor is a policy wonk who has to grind away for his successes. When George, not Jeb, was the first to win a statehouse, Mom exclaimed, "Can you believe it!?" Jeb isn't nearly as playful as his palm tree--covered tie would suggest. At a retirement center in Boynton Beach, he solemnly shakes hands, quietly adding an "honestly" to his "I need your vote." He tells TIME the race is close "but not as close as Mr. McBride's internal polls suggest. That's a fund-raising tool." At a school in New Smyrna Beach with the President, there are none of the usual little-brother jokes that Jeb never found funny anyway. The two then move on to a $25,000-a-person fund raiser at a Daytona Beach mansion.