Looking ahead to the 2016 election, Al Cardenas, the former chairman of the Republican Party in Florida, sees Jeb Bush as an ideal candidate.

Few in the political world know Bush as well as Cardenas, who just became chairman of the American Conservative Union. Since the early 1980s, Bush and Cardenas have been close personal friends.

As Florida governor, Bush asked Cardenas to head the Republican Party of Florida. They worked together in the trenches to win a Republican majority in the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction.

"Jeb Bush is the policy wonk of the family," Cardenas says. "He is very intense when it comes to policy reform. He's obsessed about implementation of ideas that will make a difference, and one of the reasons I think he's in everybody's conversation when it comes to the coming election in 2012 is because of precisely that.

"He's the only one talking reform without a political agenda, and that puts him in a very enviable place in conservative circles."