The Bush With Muy Guapo Appeal

There is “a different kind of Republican” in the Bush campaign, and he’s not the candidate. Young, darkly handsome and flawless in Spanish, George P. Bush embodies his uncle’s slogan--a promise of difference--even more than his uncle, and in ways no political consultant could concoct.

But being different from Uncle George is how “P”--as his family calls him--can help the candidate most.

“People, first, when they look at me and my physical appearance, they don’t expect George P. Bush,” said George W. Bush’s 24-year-old nephew, who got his tan skin from his Mexican-born mother. “They don’t expect a member of the Bush family at first.

“And then when they see me display passion and emotion about [my uncle], about what kind of family man he is, what kind of a person he is, I think it adds a special something that any other surrogate speaker can’t give,” he explained, relaxing at a downtown L.A. coffee shop near where he had been working until he signed up with the campaign. “That is, a personal understanding of what he’s all about, and also a younger, kind of fresher look, which they’re not accustomed to.”

Great-grandson of a senator, grandson of a president, son of Florida’s governor, and nephew of the Texas governor who wants to be president, George Prescott Bush’s pedigree alone could carry a persuasive political ad. Throw in his ease with the nation’s top two languages, a face that People magazine saw fit to show close-up, a future law degree, and links to three of America’s most voter-rich states, and he seems an ideal symbol, perhaps even candidate, for the GOP in the 21st century.

“He is a reflection of the new multicultural America,” said Lionel Sosa, a Texas consultant who crafted the television ads in which Bush--in a powder-blue shirt and with equally eloquent English and Spanish--calls his uncle un buen hombre who will be un gran presidente. “He breaks a barrier for people who would never, ever listen to a Republican message. All of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Wait a minute. Listen to this. He is one of us.’ ”

Witness the reaction recently in Santa Ana as People’s fourth “most-eligible bachelor” takes questions from adult immigrants in a level-one English class.

“What is your name?” one man asks unsteadily.

“My name is George Bush.”

“Ohh,” says the class. They’ve heard that name before.

“My mother is from Guanajuato, Mexico.”

“Ohhh.” For that, there’s also applause.

“Are you married or single?” another student wants to know.

“Single.”

A huge “ohhhh,” with a more feminine pitch this time. And even bigger applause. Later, there’s posing for pictures and cheers of “Viva Bush!”

“I think what people see in George P. Bush,” Sosa said, “is the ideal young man, the ideal young Latino that’s very acculturated, very comfortable with a grass-roots Latino community--as comfortable in East Los Angeles as he would be in a corporate boardroom.”

Bush has been dispatched with his own set of sound bites, which he readily uses at Boys & Girls clubs, GOP luncheons and rallies. And with every interview and meet-and-greet, Bush, reluctantly, is being prepped for the family business.

Politics is “something I respect,” he said during the first of several recent conversations. “I personally don’t know if that’s for me.”

The oldest of Jeb Bush and Columba Garnica Bush’s children--the trio that then-Vice President George Bush famously pointed out to President Reagan as “the little brown ones”--Bush grew up in Florida and in “Gampy’s” and “Ganny’s” White House.

During spring breaks from a Coral Gables, Fla., prep school, he got to know his funny Uncle George, who owned the Texas Rangers, at the baseball team’s training camp in Florida. In the summers, Bush cleaned the Miami office buildings owned by his father, Florida’s future governor. “My parents really had this big worry that I’d become really spoiled,” he remembered.

At Rice University in Houston, Bush was a bench-warming outfielder and majored in history. After graduating in 1998, he taught world history to ninth-graders in a depressed farming town near Miami, traveled to Mexico and Argentina to work in international law and campaigned for his uncle in New Hampshire.

Bush landed in West Los Angeles this spring to room with a college buddy (who works in real estate but wants to be an actor), enjoy the beach and clerk for a few months at the blue-chip L.A. law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. After he presides as youth chairman of next week’s Republican National Convention, he is determined to drop off the campaign trail to start law school at the University of Texas in Austin.

Eight months ago, when his uncle was running in New Hampshire’s early primary, George P. looked like just another shivering Bush volunteer, staking signs in snow banks while talking up voter registration, and his uncle, at high schools and colleges. “The No. 1 objective, if we were to come up with a creed for young Republicans--if there was a mantra--it is to get people involved in politics, to get [them] registered to vote,” he said.

George W. Bush lost in New Hampshire, but George P. Bush headed to California--no snow here, but to visit more schools in his blue GMC Jimmy before the state’s primary. He had no entourage then. Now, the guy who’s not old enough to serve in Congress looks, sheepishly, like a candidate. He has traded office casual for Brooks Bros. (He has three of their suits but manages to make them look hip.) He is driven around in SUVs with tinted glass. TV crews surround him. Handlers tug him into photographers’ frames and plop him down for radio interviews--in two languages.

“Are you going to be the next Bush for president?” a TV reporter shouts at him in San Diego.

“No, never,” her target replies, flashing the camera a pearly, playful smile.

“I don’t think you can get used to it,” Bush said during a quieter interview. “There’s just so much going on at one time. Everybody’s looking at you. Everybody’s watching your every step.”

The spotlight on Bush will be brightest if he addresses that Bush family reunion opening Monday in Philadelphia. In 1988, when he led the Pledge of Allegiance at the New Orleans convention, the audience saw little more than a dome of spiky hair. When Bush was a pudgier 16, he spoke about his grandfather--”the greatest man I’ve ever known”--at the 1992 convention.

That year, when his grandfather lost to Bill Clinton, Bush remembers Uncle George, the family comedian, telling the defeated president he had better get a driver’s license. “There were definitely some tense moments around the convention and around election night, and he [George W.] was always there to lighten up the situation,” recalled Bush, who has his own sense of humor about himself and politics.

Now retired in Houston, Gampy tucks advice to his oldest grandson into regular e-mails. Don’t get a big head about all this, he writes. Mind your manners.

“He always makes sure that I don’t get above myself,” Bush said, “that I don’t think anything about myself that isn’t right or true.”

But it’s hard to stay humble when everyone says you’re hunky. When George W. and George P. appear together, the uncle is fond of calling him muy guapo, very handsome. The elder Bush rarely fails to add, “Please keep your whistles down.”

“It makes me, you know, blush inside, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” Bush said. “He’s going to rag on me as much as he can. It’s a family thing, I guess.”

Unlike his telegenic counterpart, Al Gore’s 26-year-old daughter, Bush is not an advisor to his uncle. Karenna Gore Schiff, a lawyer, and the mother of the vice president’s 1-year-old grandson, counsels her father on wooing Generation X and women voters, and also weighs in on his wardrobe.

Bush cautiously avoids speaking to his uncle’s specific opinions and proposals. His talking points are the candidate’s decency and commitment to his large family, and the need for his own generation to surprise their elders by participating in politics and voting (preferably for a Republican).

Before he became a star of the 2000 campaign, this Bush laid out his plans to energize younger voters. He would work behind the scenes, he hoped, and only occasionally appear for the cameras. When he did hit the road, he wanted to drive his well-traveled GMC Jimmy.

Now, Bush admitted last week from an airport check-in line in Detroit, “Unfortunately, this thing has kind of spiraled out of control.” His contribution to the campaign consists almost entirely of photo ops and interviews.

That’s precisely what Bush, in an interview in San Diego just a few weeks ago, said he wanted to avoid: “There’s, I guess, some value of having a multicultural member of the family who’s also bilingual, who’s also young . . . but for me personally, there comes a point in time where you have to do something, instead of just smiling for the cameras, and contribute. That’s what I have to do.”

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Massie Ritsch can be reached at massie.ritsch@latimes.com.