Jeb Bush to Declare Presidential Run, Playing Down His Surname

But Mr. Bush will enter a presidential contest — unruly in size, unyielding in pace and voracious in cost — that is unlike any faced by his father, George Bush, who won the office in 1988, or his brother, George W. Bush, who claimed it in 2000.

And as the third member of his family to seek the nation's highest office, he brings to the race a last name that at once burnishes and tarnishes, evoking the nobility of public service and a deep distrust of political entitlement.

Mr. Bush's campaign will highlight that tension on Monday with the selection of a spare logo, first used in his failed 1994 race for governor, that excludes his surname. It reads simply “Jeb!” And while Mr. Bush's wife, Columba, and his three adult children plan to attend his speech, aides said his father and brother would not join him for the announcement at the Kendall Campus of Miami Dade College.

Mr. Bush's advisers and allies once predicted that he would emerge as the dominant Republican in the 2016 campaign, fueled by his record of conservative accomplishment as Florida's governor, his popularity at the end of his time in office and the fund-raising prowess of the Bush family network. But now they are resigned to a far longer and uglier slog for him in the Republican nominating contest.

"The operative word inside the campaign is patience," said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party leader and longtime ally of Mr. Bush. "As people get to know him, things will get better."

Mr. Bush will make his announcement at 3 pm in Miami, the multicultural city that allowed him to escape from his family's patrician roots in the ivy-covered walls of Connecticut and in the oil patches of Texas. It was Miami that eventually nurtured the political ambitions that had long been a birthright of his clan.

In his speech, he will both embrace elements of his heritage and try to transcend them, portraying himself as an entrepreneurial figure who, in the Bush family way, struck out on his own, built up a real estate business and became a governor who delivered on a promise of sweeping change.

"I said I was going to do these things, and I did them," Mr. Bush declared in a video released by his political operation on Sunday night. "The result was Florida's a lot better off."

Joining a field crowded with governors and senators, he will try on Monday to distinguish himself as an executive animated by big ideas and uniquely capable of carrying them out, pointing to his record in Florida of introducing a taxpayer-financed school voucher program, expanding charter schools, reducing the size of state government by thousands of workers and cutting taxes by billions.

Above all, he will offer himself as a messenger of optimistic conservatism, uninterested in the politics of grievance, obstructionism and partisanship that, in his eyes and those of his allies, have catapulted less accomplished rivals, like Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, to national prominence, New York Times reported.

Leadership, he says in the video, is "not just about yapping about things," an unmistakable attack on his voluble, less seasoned rivals from the Senate.

He adds: "There's a lot of people talking. And they're pretty good at it. But we need to start fixing things."

The risk for Mr. Bush, a cerebral figure who seems more at ease debating the intricacies of education policy with business leaders than electrifying a crowd of voters, is that the charismatic talkers in his party may outshine him before ballots are cast. He has yet to emerge as a front-runner in polls, lagging rivals in crucial states like Iowa, which will hold its caucuses early next year.