The nephew of President George H.W. Bush and the cousin of President George W. Bush is not launching a campaign in Maine yet, but he is taking a new step onto our political stage.
Jonathan J. Bush, who is known for founding the health care tech company athenahealth who now runs Massachusetts-based Zus Health, announced the launch of Maine For Keeps on Wednesday. The group will produce a policy roadmap as well as a podcast featuring interviews between Bush and leaders. He plans to raise $1 million for it over the next year.
The website includes a “wall of shame” aimed at regulations, including those on housing, that Bush thinks are stifling the state’s economy. The 56-year-old talked about the effort, his famous family and his criticism of President Donald Trump in an interview at his Cape Elizabeth home earlier this month, saying the state’s political leaders are thinking too small.
Questions and responses were edited for length and clarity.
This project looks to take on some really big questions about the Maine economy. What do you hope to produce at the end of it?
Bush: I think every think tank I’ve ever been associated with imagines that someday there’s a winner who says, “Geez, I need a playbook.” I have seen efforts at it in Maine. But one of the things that just doesn’t seem to get the shrift I would have imagined given the small business identity of Maine is kind of the American dream mojo.
I think most of us who have tried it — and I’ve tried it in lots of places — feel like raising kids in Maine is the greatest place in the world to do it. But it’s sort of accepted that if you make that choice, you’re sort of implicitly saying: “Maine: bucolic childhood for your children or the American dream.”
I think that is a learned helplessness that is false. The more I peel into it, I run into more and more sort of self-inflicted constraints that make it logically sort of irrational to invest in Maine.
We’re all talking about dividing the pittance different ways. Who gets this piece of the pittance? Who gets that piece of the pittance? Will the boys get the pittance or the girls get the pittance? Why is it a pittance?
I could go back to a Joshua Chamberlain speech in 1868 in which he effectively talks about the “brain drain.” Maine has had a lot of the same economic problems for a long time. Where do you see potential for us to reverse that?
I’d like to see us take on energy, housing and just basic business regulation. We don’t have a lot of money right now. We’re upside down, and we’re an old state. If we go after people’s benefits with our Cartier chainsaw, I think that Mainers will be grossed out in both parties. But I think if we focus on active shooting of the foot first, we can get some lift.
Whenever you find yourself being strangled by regulation, it’s not that some corrupt guy said, “Let me strangle future generations.” There was some sort of proximate problem.
The entire Environmental Protection Act in the 1970s was a genuine, well-meaning effort by a Republican. Inadvertently, over time, people need to stay and grow there and it takes on a life of itself.
Energy in Maine is one of those. The environmental movement that attached itself to energy with the best of intentions has now done great environmental as well as social harm, and it needs to have an honest second check. The guys who came up with Maine’s latest building code didn’t mean to put their penny loafer on the throat of someone living in a trailer.
I loved a line that someone gave to the Texas Tribune a few years ago who said the Bush name in politics is about like the Romanovs in Russia. You’ve been critical of Trump. What’s the place for you in the modern Republican Party?
A big question is, what is a Republican? When I grew up, it was free trade, give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, but you don’t get a safety net. You show your work and you work your way up. By and large, it seems like if you play sort of policy bingo, I find myself still a Republican.
With all systems over time, all economies, all markets, there’s a concentration over time, which gave us the Romanovs in the first place. People are chucking spears at each other. Then once this guy had 50 spear chuckers, the guy with 35 was like, screw it, I’m joining him. And now he’s got 85 spear chuckers.
I’m definitely a Bush. But I did not follow the family route. I didn’t go into the establishment. I started a birth center in my basement with a few friends. I’ve always found that the best way to be a Bush is to have nothing in common with any of the other Bushes.
When I’m in northern Maine, I try to point out a couple things to maybe consider about Trump’s imperfection. When I’m in Southern Maine, I try to point out a couple of things that maybe people in their Trump derangement syndrome can’t see.
This guy shifted the Overton window over real issues that we all knew about and wouldn’t talk about. So I don’t know if you need to be borderline narcissistic or unstable to be able to either fearlessly or insanely shift the Overton window as well as he has.
There are no nations without borders. I think immigrants are the greatest thing that we’ve got going for us as a country. But he was right about that. He was right about diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s hard to believe we ever got into it that being a good racist was good.
Would you be doing this if you weren’t kicking the tires on a campaign?
Yes, 100 percent. Maine is not as economically successful as it should be, as it needs to be, and I believe, in enough pain that they’re open to ideas more so than in Washington.
My dad was in the Army, and he said you’ve got to leave the equipment better than you found it. I’m loving my second chapter of entrepreneurship, but it’s looking very similar to the last chapter. Playing the game with all my warts and all of my advantages doesn’t feel quite as gratifying as actually improving the game for others to play.
