Here's a good job for Jeb Bush

Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas, who served as a top aide to Mack McLarty when McLarty was special envoy to the Americas during the Clinton administration, proposes in the Miami Herald that George W. Bush appoint his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, to a position similar to McLarty's—presumably after Jeb leaves office in Florida in January 2007.

I have found Farnsworth and McLarty both very knowledgeable and very sensible about Latin American issues, and I think Farnsworth's idea is excellent. There's nothing wrong with our current assistant secretary of state for the western hemisphere, Thomas Shannon, a career diplomat who seems highly competent and entirely willing, unlike some in Foggy Bottom, to carry out administration policies. But there's also something to be said for having a special envoy known to have close relations with the White House.

Jeb Bush would be an excellent choice even if he were not the president's brother. In my opinion Bush is the best and most innovative governor in all the 50 states, but he is term limited, and he has reason to feel tired after taking whacking after undeserved whacking from Florida's mostly liberal press and being attacked, undeservedly, by the teachers union and black leaders for his efforts to improve education for black children in Florida. He speaks fluent and idiomatic Spanish; the Democratic pollster Sergio Bendixen told me that Bush speaks better Spanish than any other American politician. I am sure he is very familiar with Latin American issues and with many Latin American leaders. The only drawback: So far as I know, he doesn't speak Portuguese, the language of Brazil.

We face a real challenge in Latin America, not only from Cuban dictator Fidel Castro but from leftist demagogues like Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales. The bad news is that Chávez has lots of oil money, has succeeded in establishing authoritarian control over his own country, and has been interfering in the politics of other countries. He is given to saying that the United States under George W. Bush is the worst tyranny in the history of the world. He is supporting the Sandinista Daniel Ortega in the presidential election in Nicaragua.

The good news is that Chávez's message is evidently not selling well. Ollanta Humala, his candidate in the forthcoming runoff for president of Peru, seems to have fallen behind his opponent, Alan García, and in Mexico, PAN presidential candidate Felipe Calderón's ads linking his opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with Chávez have helped Calderón overtake López Obrador's lead in the polls. In other words, the great masses of Latin America are not necessarily swayed by Chávez's demagogic leftism.

Moreover, other Latin American leaders pigeonholed by many as leftists, like Brazil's President Lula da Silva and Chile's President Michelle Bachelet, have been nondemagogic moderate social democrats with whom we can live entirely comfortably. I've written before on Latin America and the battle of ideas that is going on there. The appointment of Jeb Bush as special envoy to the region would give us a strong, able, and visible spokesman in that battle.