Jeb Bush. Not conservative enough. Try as I might, it remains impossible to see these two concepts as even remotely related. John Ellis Bush, the second son of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Bush, who during his first run for Florida governor in 1994 cheerfully called himself a head-banging conservative, a hang-’em-by-the-neck conservative … who during his second run for Florida governor in 1998 had to craft for himself a more compassionate persona so as not to scare off independent voters … that Jeb Bush has come to be viewed with suspicion by the uber-conservative, Tea Party wing of his Republican Party?

Admittedly, there are his heresies on Common Core and immigration, the two hottest-button issues of the day in that world—but that’s enough to make Jeb a moderate? Really?

For those of us who covered Jeb’s two terms in Tallahassee, this is beyond mind-boggling. On issue after issue, Jeb’s track record in Florida pushed conservatism’s envelope to the breaking point.

For anti-tax conservatives, Jeb slashed the state’s collections by a cumulative $14 billion over his eight years. For the devoted subset of supply-siders: The bulk of these cuts came via the complete repeal of Florida’s decades-old wealth tax on financial instruments. It pretty much had been the only progressive tax the state had, since Florida’s constitution forbids an income tax.

For anti-spending conservatives, Jeb line-item vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars in hometown projects from the state budget year after year.

For small-government conservatives, Jeb eliminated thousands of jobs by outsourcing huge swaths of state duties, including the massive human resources function and the state purchasing office.

For law-and-order conservatives, Jeb championed tough-on-crime bills like “10-20-life” for gun offenders and three-strikes legislation for repeat offenders. He jammed through the legislature a death-penalty overhaul drastically limiting appeals for condemned inmates (it was soon afterward struck down, however, by the Florida Supreme Court).

For pro-gun conservatives, Jeb approved an enhanced concealed carry law and, infamously, the NRA-written “Stand Your Ground” law. (After Trayvon Martin, Jeb said he did not believe it should have been applied in that instance.)

For religious conservatives, Jeb rammed through education bills that created the first statewide school voucher programs in the nation, and then spent years defending them against oversight attempts. He approved the “Choose Life” license plate and sent state money to groups that counseled women against having abortions. And, famously, he pushed through legislation allowing him as governor to intervene in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case—and at the very end nearly triggered a showdown with a local judge by sending state police officers to seize her from a Tampa Bay area hospice.

With all this on his résumé, Jeb Bush is now considered a moderate? A RINO? What more can conservatives want?

***

It’s entirely possible that a big part of the “Jeb-as-moderate” meme comes from a simple lack of information. North of the Georgia line, how many people have had occasion to care about what Jeb did in Florida from 1999 through 2007?

After all, how many people outside Texas knew what George W. Bush had done in that state prior to 2000? For that matter, how many people even inside Illinois knew what Barack Obama had accomplished in the U.S. Senate prior to 2008?

In the absence of other information, a lot of assumptions about Jeb Bush, for better or worse, are based on beliefs about his father and older brother. The Republican base hears “Bush,” and they remember George H.W.’s broken “read my lips” promise on taxes. Or George W.’s prescription-drug entitlement and ballooning budget deficits and unpopular wars.

There are debates to be had regarding the fairness and intellectual consistency of some of these criticisms. After Ronald Reagan’s initial tax cuts, for example, he raised taxes way more than George H.W. Bush ever did but rarely caught grief for it, even back when he was alive. And the Republican base did not seem to object to George W. Bush’s Iraq War back in 2003—nor did it object to the single biggest driver of his budget deficits, his big tax cuts.

Setting that aside, though, there’s an easy solution to a lack of information. And as Jeb considers his nascent campaign and Republican activists begin to learn both about his accomplishments and the take-no-prisoners style in which he won them, they may well get over their doubts and accept him as their party’s conservative savior.

But what if they don’t? What if the Republican base demands of him exactly those things that he cannot give them?

At this week’s Wall Street Journal CEO Council meeting in Washington, Jeb outlined how he thinks a GOP presidential candidate in 2016 might have to embrace a “lose the primary to win the general” approach. He might have been speaking precisely about his party base’s two newest litmus tests—immigration and the Common Core education standards.

***

Jeb does not call himself the Outsourcing Governor or the Terri Schiavo Governor. He calls himself the Education Governor.

And key to that label has been his consistent advocacy through the decades for higher standards in public schools. True, pushing those rigorous benchmarks provides yet another club for pounding on teachers unions. True, higher standards also provide the moral and intellectual justification for awarding private school vouchers to students in the public schools that fail to meet those standards.