HE IS WHO GOVERNOR WALKER WAS TRYING TO BE:

One month before Jeb Bush was sworn in as governor of Florida, he was already musing about bold plans to reduce the size of the state government.

"One of our goals should be to have fewer government employees each year we are serving," Mr. Bush wrote to two aides in an email in December 1998. "We need a baseline from which to start. Labor has huge potential to be reduced, possibly in half."

The Saturday after he was inaugurated, Mr. Bush forwarded that message to another aide and asked, "Can you make this happen?"

When Mr. Bush left office in 2007 after two terms, the state government in Tallahassee had been transformed by his hard-charging and driven style.

And while he did not slash the number of state employees by half, he did privatize thousands of public jobs. [...]

In an email to a friend who was close to a teachers' union leader about his effort to institute higher-education standards, Mr. Bush instructed his friend to tell the union leader "that a reformed system will be a better one for dedicated teachers."

"I believe they know this, but they also know that it won't be so good for the bottom third of teachers that U.T.D. spends most of its resources defending," Mr. Bush said in March 1999, referring to the union, the United Teachers of Dade.

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