Gee. Jebthro's helped a lot of felons get off in Florida -- Republican felons. Here are a few Facts from 2000:
THE CUBAN STRATEGYby WILLIAM FINNEGAN
Can Jeb Bush deliver the Florida vote in November?The New Yorker, Issue of 2004-03-15
Posted 2004-03-08
EXCERPT...
Indeed, Jeb Bush is largely responsible for the fact that most Miami Cubans are Republicans. Though perennially described as “right-wing Cuban exiles,” most of them started out as Democrats. They were (and are) liberal on the social issues that tend to divide Americans, and they share a historic belief in the welfare state—a belief that the Cuban Refugee Program, the most generous immigrant-assistance effort in the history of the United States, only encouraged. President Kennedy, who was initially adored, was blamed by many exiles for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961. And yet their bitterness did not drive them into the Republican Party, which in Miami was weak and uninterested, in any case, in Latino immigrants. Ronald Reagan stirred Cuban-Americans with his messianic anti-Communism. But even he was mistrusted by the exiles, who had been forced to learn, repeatedly, that the interests of any American President only periodically coincided with their own.
Jeb Bush, however, they trusted. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican congressman from South Florida, described Jeb to me as “a soul mate.” Diaz-Balart, who comes from a prominent political family—his aunt was Fidel Castro’s first wife—recalls that his grandparents were admirers of Franklin Roosevelt. Diaz-Balart himself was a Democrat until the nineteen-eighties, although the local party didn’t take much notice. Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen—another scion of a prominent family, who is also now a Republican representative in Washington—couldn’t get through the Democratic primaries in Miami.
Both Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen credit Jeb Bush with persuading them to switch parties. When Jeb became chairman of the Dade County Republican Party, in 1984, he simply looked at South Florida’s demographics, saw the opportunity, and went to work making the Republican Party the natural home for Cuban exiles. In 1979, registered Democrats still outnumbered Republicans among Cuban-Americans by forty-nine per cent to thirty-nine per cent. By 1988, only twenty-four per cent were Democrats, and sixty-eight per cent were Republicans.
Meanwhile—and this is a typical incongruity—Diaz-Balart runs for reëlection every two years with the support of the union locals in his district and voted against nafta. He and Ros-Lehtinen were among the tiny handful of Republicans in Congress who would not sign Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, and voted against the welfare and immigration reform acts in 1996. Jeb Bush, for his part, in his re-inaugural address last year, stood on the steps of the old state capitol in Tallahassee and said, “There would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers—silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040315fa_fact