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First Best Second Choice
It was hot yesterday in Palo Alto. Well, mid-to-upper 80s with little in the way of a breeze, which may sound laughable depending on where you’re reading this. But it felt downright Dante-esque here in Northern California given that most of our May seemed overcast and unseasonably cool. I won’t take the coward’s way out and blame the heat for this evergreen story — vice-presidential speculation. What got me thinking about it was this story on Jeb Bush’s presidential staffing hires — specifically, the surprise choice of Danny Diaz as campaign manager.
About Diaz: he was a senior advisor on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign and, four years before, a deputy communications director on John McCain’s campaign. But here’s what got my attention: Diaz has also worked for New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez (here is he tweeting about her back in 2014). And if you want to play the veepstakes guessing game, Martinez is worth a wager for at least three reasons:
1) Outreach. Jeb Bush is bilingual; he won’t back down on immigration reform. His kick-off speech next Monday will be at the Kendall campus of Miami Dade College, thus highlighting a theme of minority aspiration (last fall, 71% of credit-seeking students at Miami Dade were Hispanic and 17% were black). Should Bush receive his party’s nomination, Martinez and her compelling biography (nation’s first female Latina governor, former prosecutor, daughter of a Texas deputy sheriff) would seem a natural fit.
Late last month, the New Mexico legislature passed