MAKING THE MAJORITY PERMANENT:

"He has the most potential," UCLA professor Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions polling, says of Bush. "Historically, he's been more moderate than Rubio has been on a host of Latino issues. And his family situation can't be ignored."

That family situation includes brother George W., who as president championed immigration and education reforms important to Hispanics, as well as Bush's own immediate family. "I know the immigrant experience because I married a beautiful girl from Mexico. My children are bicultural and bilingual," Jeb Bush said Tuesday at Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan.

The trip to Puerto Rico was followed Wednesday by a keynote speech to the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference in Houston. In San Juan, Bush talked about statehood and rum in Spanish and English. In Texas, it was education and immigration, in Spanish and English. Boxes, checked.

Rubio is an eloquent speaker who can reach "these Latinos who don't really feel that the party's talking to them," says Stephen Nuno, a Northern Arizona University professor who is writing a book about Latinos and the GOP. "Unfortunately for Marco Rubio, Bush can make the same speech in the same language to the same people, and he comes with a little more gravitas."

A Bush aide notes that in addition to his Mexican ties, Bush spent six months in Puerto Rico running his father's 1980 campaign, and before that lived in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was a vice president and branch manager for Texas Commerce Bank. "The governor does have the ability to resonate culturally within the different groups in the Hispanic community. He understands how to communicate within the different sectors," the aide says.

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