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Maybe it was the sunset selfies on the lawn at Walker's Point, the family compound, with the state flags of Texas and Maine fluttering in the salty breeze.
Maybe it was the standing ovation for the elder President George Bush, frail but beaming, when he arrived Friday morning at a discussion of how to elect another of his sons to the White House.
But over two days of lobster rolls and strategy sessions, whatever reluctance Jeb Bush may have had about publicly embracing his dynastic inheritance seemed to vanish. And for the hundreds of donors to Bush's campaign for president who gathered in this seaside town - seat of the Bush family for more than a century - the family name seemed to have few downsides.
"I think Jeb's made clear that he's not going to run away from his family," said Eric J Tanenblatt, who led the Georgia campaign of George W Bush, Bush's older brother, in the 2000 presidential election.
Bush's father, his mother, his wife and even his son have raised money for his campaign or for his "super PAC," tapping into a family donor network that began as his mother's Christmas card mailing list. And now an invitation to Walker's Point, for decades the ultimate VIP room in Republican politics, is Bush's to bestow.
On Monday, he invited the last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, to Walker's Point for lunch, hoping to soothe lingering hurt over what Romney's supporters considered a desultory endorsement of their candidate in 2012. On Thursday, a visit to the compound was the prize for members of the vaunted Bush fund-raising operation, who arrived to the news that they had amassed about as much money as the rest of the Republican field and their super PACs combined. Marking the day, they gathered with the Bush family for a group photo.
Such donor retreats have become a routine feature of presidential campaigns, all the more important as the price tag for a major-party candidacy breaks the $1 billion mark. They are intended to reflect some actual or projected essence of the candidate: Hillary Rodham Clinton gathered her top fund-raisers in May at a Brooklyn warehouse, for example, while Romney invited top donors for annual hikes and foreign policy lectures at the Stein Eriksen Lodge Deer Valley in Park City, Utah, a favourite destination of his family.
George W Bush, the former president and former Texas governor, styled himself as a political outsider, and pointedly eschewed the establishment trappings of Maine. Many of the donors in Kennebunkport recalled, with something less than fondness, their frequent meetings at his ranch in Crawford, Tex, huddled under a tent in 100-degree heat.
But few candidates, they said, could compete with the Bush family's inner sanctum, a compound of a half-dozen homes on a rocky spit jutting into the Atlantic, one of them recently built for Jeb Bush and his family.
"This is to the Bushes what Hyannis Port is to the Kennedys," said Dirk Van Dongen, a lobbyist in Washington who was making his first trip to the Bush home.
In his early months as a candidate, Bush seemed unsure of how tightly to embrace the family mantle. He dodged questions about his older brother's record as president and eschewed his last name on campaign literature. (His exclamatory bumper stickers read, simply, "Jeb!") Announcing his campaign last month, Bush declared that "not one of us deserves the job by right of resume, party, seniority, family or family narrative."
2015©The New York Times News Service
