The central task of Jeb Bush’s campaign, aside from trumping Donald Trump, is proving to the American public that he’s not just a last name, a son, a scion. Thus far, his main weapon in this essential project is his wife.

Forty-four years ago, as a 17-year-old enrolled in a class called Man and Society at his ritzy New England prep school, Bush spent three months in a poor village outside León, Mexico, helping to build a schoolhouse. The intended lesson was about poverty and power, but he took something else away instead. In the zócalo in Léon, Jeb met a 16-year-old high school girl named Columba Garnica de Gallo. She was the daughter of a farmer, he the child of an oil millionaire. He saw stars: “lightning,” he has said. “Literally love at first sight.” On the campaign trail, he offers a line that’s sure to be a swooner: “My life can be defined in one real, powerful way, which is B.C. and A.C.: Before Columba and After Columba.” She was, he says, “my first date and my only love.” But before Jeb could marry Columba, he had to prove to her much the same thing as he now does to the American people: that he’s more than just his rich and powerful family.

Columba’s outsize importance to her husband’s political myth is illustrated by a visit to his campaign website. The first thing you read, beneath the e-mail sign-up field, is that his “life changed forever” when he saw a girl. “Meet Jeb,” it says, then defines the presidential candidate by the moment he saw met Columba. His last name is nowhere in sight.

Read the article “Columba Bush, the Key to Understanding Jeb Bush’s Identity” on bloomberg.com.