MEANWHILE, THE SPACE THAT NEEDS TO BE FILLED IS JEB-SHAPED:

The View from the Sidelines: Jeb Bush on the Republican future. (Fred Barnes, May 31, 2010, Weekly Standard)

For Republican candidates, “This is a good time to be a little less constrained in your thinking,” Bush says. “Candidates that win will be a little emboldened. They’re not going to take the traditional point of view that we can’t be too provocative because we’re going to upset the population. Think big and bold. Fill the space. Paint in Britto-like colors, not pastels. My man Romero Britto. He’s our favorite artist, a Brazilian artist.” Britto paintings hang on the walls of Bush’s office.

“My guess is, post-November, should things go well, you’re going to see the emerging Cantor-Ryan wing of the Republican party—the policy activists—in their ascendency,” Bush says. “They’ll be in the ascendency in the Senate as well. And you’ll have activist conservative governors. In 2011, I think you’re going to see all sorts of efforts to act on the belief in entrepreneurial capitalism and limited government.”

He’s read Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” for reform, “all 95 pages of it. It’s fantastic. Paul Ryan is the only elected official that’s actually laid out a plan. He has a very thoughtful, realistic approach to dealing with this fiscal crisis, and he’s the only guy out of 300 million people that I’ve seen that has done so.”

For the country to prosper, Bush thinks a dramatic increase in immigration is needed. He’s sympathetic to Arizona’s tough response to a surge in illegal immigrants and also supports “comprehensive reform,” code for stiffer border security and a path to citizenship for illegals living here. But, he says, “This whole debate in Washington is missing one key ingredient, the real world ingredient. How are we going to grow to create jobs, real jobs, private sector jobs that aren’t created out of fiat money?”

Bush’s answer is to reject President Obama’s economic plan and adopt “sustained economic growth as a policy. Part of that would be to create a new immigration system that allowed us to have a guest worker program .  .  . and would open our country to capitalists, entrepreneurs, technologists, researchers. They would come. The only way you can grow is to have a meaningful immigration strategy that says growth is good.”

But that—and especially amnesty for illegals—can’t occur until the border with Mexico is secure. “More fence, sure,” Bush says. “It’s just no one trusts Washington until you show the good faith of protecting the border.”

Bush has done a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what an economic growth strategy could produce. Obama’s policy won’t generate more than 1.5 percent growth annually, he says. But with “lower taxes, more rational regulation, limiting the power of government in general, particularly in Washington, investing in research, innovation, education—and get out of the way, trust capitalism to work and you can achieve easily 2 percent more per year,” Bush insists. “You end up with $3.5 trillion of extra economic activity, more than the entire economy of Germany.”

Not bad, and there’s an additional benefit: unifying conservatives. “We have all these factions inside the conservative cause, people focused on social issues, or libertarian leave-me-alone issues or paleocons or neocons or traditional conservatives,” Bush says. “It seems to me if you ask what is the one thing that we all agree on, [it’s] that we passionately agree that entrepreneurial capitalism works.”