George
W. Bush and Al Gore
By
Nicholas Lemann
In
memory of Stephen
B. Lemann
Slate
eBooks
Redmond
Third Edition. Copyright 2000 by Nicholas Lemann. “The Redemption” originally
appeared in the Jan. 31, 2000 issue of The New Yorker. “Gore Without a
Script” originally appeared in the July 31, 2000 issue of The New Yorker.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Everything went wrong for George W. Bush,
until he made it all go right.
What would happen if we saw the man he
really is?
I've spent my whole career rather self-righteously avoiding what at least used to be the main event in journalism, presidential campaign coverage. Only overlooked social issues for me! So when, shortly after I joined the staff of The New Yorker in the spring of 1999, my new boss, David Remnick, began nudging me to write a profile of George W. Bush, I resisted. Did Remnick relentlessly break my will, first with regard to Bush and then with regard to Al Gore? Well, not exactly. It was more that I started to wonder what exactly was so wrong with writing about the presidential election, especially at a time when people seem to need to be reminded of the centrality of politics, government, and public life in our society. So off I went.
These two pieces were researched and written at two different phases of the campaign--the Bush during a relative lull in mid-to-late 1999, the Gore during the hectic runup to the Democratic Convention in the spring of 2000. But the real salient difference between them, which may not be apparent from reading, is that the Gore campaign was much more accessible and cooperative than the Bush campaign. Perhaps not wrongly, the Bushes perceive The New Yorker as belonging to a Northeastern liberal-elitist culture where they're never going to be able to get a fair shake, and the Gores perceive it as a friendly jurisdiction. When you combine with this the lightness of Bush's resume and the heaviness of Gore's, it becomes clear that the problem in writing about Bush, if you're me, is getting enough material, and the problem is writing about Gore is finding something coherent and fresh in a great mountain of material.
What I tried to do here was make each candidate come alive as a fully realized character. The way to do that is to find a key--a problem that the person's adult life must be devoted to solving. In both cases, it's irresistible, and also justifiable, to see the candidate as a political scion and his career as a ringing of the changes on that role. Hence the title I've given this book. A generation from now, the obvious point about this election will be that both candidates came from political dynasties. Aside from that enormous similarity between Bush and Gore, though, they're about as different personally as one can imagine two people at their level of American politics being.
As I've made clear,
this book wouldn't exist if David Remnick hadn't assigned these profiles to me,
so my first thanks go to him. Jeffrey Frank of The New Yorker edited both with
consummate skill. Adam Schatz fact-checked the Bush piece and Anne Stringfield
fact-checked the Gore piece, in both cases not only saving me from errors but
also finding new material that I was able to use. Amanda Urban, my agent for
twenty years, is responsible for getting the pieces published as a book, and
Michael Kinsley, my friend for twenty-five years, is the actual publisher. Many
thanks to them too. It's customary at this point finally to thank one's family
for its unfailing support during the long grim period of book production. But
since this is an ebook, that period lasted from a Thursday to the following
Tuesday--so I'll just thank them for being a great family.
Everything went wrong for George W. Bush,
until he made it all go right.
“It’s quite
fascinating,” said Joe. “This big honor, the biggest in the world, can happen
to a man almost overnight. What was Coolidge when he was nominated for the
vice-presidency? He’d been governor of Massachusetts and settled the police
strike. What was Harding? Well, Harding isn’t a good example, because he’d not
only been governor of his state but United States senator as well. But look at
the other side, the Democrats. Wilson, a governor and a college president. Cox?
Nobody. Franklin Roosevelt, the fellow that ran for vice-president, I used to
know him slightly. At least I met him at dances when I was in college. A
typical New York snob, I always thought.”
--John O’Hara, “Ten North Frederick.”
I met George W. Bush once by accident back in the early seventies,
at Harvard. I must have been a freshman or a sophomore. Some home-town friends
of mine from New Orleans, Grant and Margot Thomas, were in Cambridge for a few
years because Grant was getting a master’s degree, and I used to drop by their
apartment all the time. To me, it was a warm island of Southern gaiety in a
sour sea of ambition and after-the-revolution ill will. Life had a light and
charming cast there. The Thomases had a dog named Layla, and their neighbors,
who were the authors of the Curious George books, would appear occasionally to
deliver fond mock-chastisings in a Mittel-europa accent. One afternoon when I
was there, the doorbell rang and a guy came up the stairs: George Bush.
I remember having two thoughts. One was that he looked like a
standard-issue boarding-school boy turned business-school student. He was
wearing wide-wale corduroy trousers, an Izod polo shirt with the collar turned
up, a crew-neck sweater, and Sperry Topsiders--the uniform of the day for his
group. He had curly brown hair worn just a little longer, but not much, than
you could wear it at your first job. The second thought was that he must be the
son of the head of the Republican National Committee. This was, on the one
hand, just about the worst credential you could present in Cambridge at that
moment, but, on the other hand, being the son of a definite somebody always
registered as a plus at Harvard. One of the things you were socialized to do
there was to notice that kind of signifier of position, and affect not to
notice. So we greeted each other with meaningful blankness. I, in my Army
fatigues, T-shirt, long hair, and big round glasses, would have come across to
him as being as deeply not his type as he did to me. The famous Bush charm was
not on display. After a few minutes, I said I had to go.
I mention all this because it was very much at the top of the
agenda the next time I came face to face with George Bush, which was a few days
before Christmas, in the hamlet of Derry, New Hampshire. At one end of town,
outside the office of the local newspaper, sat a big bus, which had been got up
in the manner of the conveyance of a travelling musical act, with a painting of
an eagle on one side and a landscape on the other. A small clutch of people, some
of them members of a Texas Rangers security detail, stood outside. Soon Bush
emerged from the newspaper office, and I introduced myself. He gave me an
appraising look. “You’re Henry Thomas’s friend,” he said. “I saw him last
night, at the Christmas party at the Mansion”--the Governor’s Mansion, in
Austin. “Didn’t you teach with him at the Chinquapin School?”
What Bush does with people is establish a direct, personal
connection--a vector of just-you-and-me. One aspect of it is that everybody
gets a nickname, which thenceforth becomes the fixative in the relationship,
the instant way of establishing that there’s this special thing going on
between Bush and the other person. My friend Grant Thomas was born Henry Grant
Thomas, Jr., so, somewhere back in the mists of time in the private-school and
country-club world of Houston, where they first met, he became, to Bush, and to
Bush only, Henry. Chinquapin was a school in Texas for poor kids where Grant
taught for a year, during the period when Bush was in the Air National Guard. I
had registered, therefore, as an old friend of Grant’s, probably from the
South, probably a liberal, but possibly at least the kind who goes beyond
hypocritical preachiness. Not exactly right, but in the ballpark. He motioned
for me to get on the bus.
Inside, the long channel of space had been divided into two parts,
a dressing room in back and a living room in front, where eight or ten people
could sit on upholstered couches. A few aides were inside, and a few local
Republican politicians, and another reporter, from the newspaper in Nashua. I
was going to interview Bush as the bus travelled from Derry to Manchester, a
few miles away, where he would give a speech at a high school.
Bush looked great. He was wearing a wool jacket that perfectly
hugged his back and shoulders, a white shirt with some kind of crosshatched
texture in the fabric, black ostrich-skin cowboy boots emblazoned with his
initials, and a belt with a nicely worked silver buckle. The curly dark hair of
long ago had matured into a close-cropped gray pelt like a Roman emperor’s. He
was trim and golden. His face had that middle-aged patrician’s quality of being
creased in a way that somehow connotes success.
He began the interview by questioning me. Hadn’t I recently
published a book on education and testing? It was obvious that in his mind this
book had been filed under “Respectable but Too Liberal.” Didn’t I want people’s
S.A.T. scores to be readjusted to account for their backgrounds? I said I
didn’t. Well, then, what did I want? He was looking to identify the thing that
he knew he disagreed with. I said I was for a national achievement test, based
on national curriculum standards. That was it. “You’ve got your opinion, I’ve
got mine,” he said, and then he went on to explain that a national test was
unnecessary because of a long-running government-financed program called the
National Assessment of Educational Progress--a program that everybody inside
the education world and almost nobody outside of it knows about. He grinned. “And
now that I’ve won that argument...” He and the appreciative audience in the bus
broke out laughing. He stretched out and put his boots up on the couch.
The interview, in other words, began with the quality of an
amiably competitive game. Bush wasn’t just going to sit back and let me ask him
questions; he was going to take the initiative, establish a teasing,
givin’-you-shit vibe, and score a quick point off me, as if to show that he
wasn’t an easy mark for the kind of tricky public-policy questions that I had
probably come to ask. Now that all that had been established, we could begin.
But, even then, that competitive feeling hung heavy in the air.
Sometimes Bush would answer a question by going into what I knew to be a
well-used string of sentences from one of his speeches--the unspoken part of
the answer being “See, I stayed on message and didn’t let you trip me up.” Or
he’d jump in, mid-question, with a quick, triumphant answer, as if to say that
he’d been ready for that one. When a question began with a premise, he’d often
challenge the premise. When he detected an allusion to a public criticism of
him, he’d declare his critics to be wrong. While he was answering, he was also
ascending a rising curve of nomenclatural informality which began with “Nicholas”
and quickly made its way to “Nick.” He seemed happiest when he could come in
with a quick, sure answer. Once, I asked what he’d want written on his
Presidential tombstone. Instantly: “He came, he said, he accomplished.”
There was something jarring between the tone of Bush’s prospective
Presidency, as he sketched it out--in which he would lead by the example of his
personal probity, heal the partisan sickness that grips Washington, and solve
problems in a practical, positive way--and his aggressive, ironic manner. Or,
when there wasn’t this curious dissonance, there was instead a nearly
instantaneous switching back and forth between serious and comic modes. The
feeling was: We don’t really have to be all official and sombre with each
other, do we? Can’t we be real--which inevitably means a high quotient of
kidding--instead? Here’s an example:
Me: What do you do about the pure, horrible human-rights-abuse
case happening in some corner of the world with no real strategic import to the
United States?
Bush: And Rwanda’s a great example of what you’re referring to.
There will be times when the United States can lend its prestige and help and
wealth to help ameliorate a situation. But people should understand that I will
commit troops only where our strategic interests are involved. And, as you
said, there’s no strategic importance to the United States.
Me: Was Somalia (pronounced with a long “a”) a mistake?
Bush: Somalia (pronounced with a short “a”). Please, Nick.
(Mock-serious shocked look--he’d scored another point.) You know, I have to get
every single word--I’m a leader, I have to be correct a hundred per cent of the
time. (General laughter in the front of the bus.) I haven’t unleashed my great
line yet, which is that my mother taught me not to be a know-it-all. (Pause for
a perfect beat, quick innocent glance around the room.) I didn’t let her down.
(More laughter. Bush acknowledges it with a broad smile, then turns serious
again.) You know, it’s an interesting question. What makes it interesting, of
course, is that Somalia was during my dad’s Administration. And I try to avoid
putting myself in a position where, you know, the headlines scream “bush
criticizes father.” I think the big mistake, of course, is to change any
humanitarian relief mission into a political mission. Which is what the Clinton
Administration did. The idea of getting troops in to distribute food and then
get them out of there is a reach, as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t want to
second-guess.
What didn’t happen in the interview was this: Bush’s thinking
about a question for a minute (or at least giving the appearance that he was),
and then offering what came across as a considered, custom-tailored answer.
Instead, the couple of times when we got onto unplowed ground, he’d come back with
a non sequitur. I asked Bush about his position in favor of abolishing
inheritance taxes (something all the Republican candidates except John McCain
are for). It rarely comes up in the campaign, so I thought I might get a fresh
answer:
Me: Let me ask you a question about the inheritance tax, or the
death tax, which you’ve repeatedly called--
Bush (jumping in): Eight-year phaseout.
Me: More of a conceptual question. If you abolish it, over eight
years or however many years, don’t you wind up with a country that looks more
like an aristocracy, because--
Bush (jumping in again): No. Because I think wealth would be more
likely to be dissipated, without the trusts and the legal documents that are
formed to protect a wasted generation from squandering their granddaddy’s
lucre.
Me: So if you just give it to them instead of putting it in trust,
then that would sort of solve that problem?
Bush: Well, I think it’s more likely that people who are unable
to--I mean, I think people would spend their money. I do. Now, this inheritance
situation for the, as you said, in quotes, the aristocracy, is: The trusts are
pretty well protected by the laws, the tax laws. It’s quite the opposite of
what you said. The current law has tied up tons of wealth.
This seemed to me rooted more in some deep and long-standing well
of emotion about no-good trust-fund kids than in logic, because even without
inheritance taxes rich people can set up trusts. But I didn’t get a chance to
pursue it, because we had arrived in Manchester, early.
Bush motioned for the bus driver to pull over at a Dunkin’ Donuts
and went inside, pulling me along. He shook the hand of everyone in the place,
saying, in each case, “I’m George Bush. I’m askin’ for your vote.” When there
weren’t any hands left, we sat at a table and continued the interview for a
while, in multitasking mode--Bush shifting between talking to me, talking to
the people at the adjoining tables, and greeting anybody who came up to say
hello.
When the possibilities of Dunkin’ Donuts seemed to have been
exhausted, Bush turned back to the three or four of us who were sitting with
him and said, “Here’s what we’ve learned. Two things. One, how many people
there are in New Hampshire with a Texas connection. So far today, two. The
other is--we ran into a Hispanic lady from Estado de Chihuahua--how many people
from Mexico there are here.”
It was time to get back on the bus. My interview was plainly over.
I asked Bush what I should do now. “Usually what we do with guys like you is
drop ’em on the road about a third of the way there,” he said, with a little
smile, “but you can ride with us to the high school.” So I sat and watched
while Bush chatted with the other people on the bus. He was relaxed and happy,
but hardly at rest. His face was like a library of human mugging--eyebrow
raises, cheek blowouts, lip purses, mock grimaces, feints of surprise, and, of
course, the famous smirk, which, in this context, seemed to be just one aspect
of an all-out effort, requiring the service of all body parts, not to be dull,
rather than a way of appearing superior. At one point, he and the New Hampshire
politicians got into a discussion of whether the Texas Rangers should re-sign
Aaron Sele, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher who had just become a free agent.
Bush shot me a glance that indicated that he reckoned the name Aaron Sele would
be unfamiliar to someone like me. (True.) “Baseball player, Nicky.” Evidently
Bush’s search for a nickname for me had now found its end point.
We all went into the high school, where Bush gave a short speech
to wild applause and then held a press conference. Back on the bus, he
indicated me, with a nod of his head, to the other people in the living room.
“This guy says to me, ‘You should talk about N.A.E.P. in there,’” Bush said.
“But if I did that not a single person would know what I was talking about!”
He’d scored again, but this time the levelling of a charge that everybody knew
to be outlandish, a fable representing my impracticality, seemed to mean that I
was being fitted out for a pleasant if somewhat distant spot in the Bush
emotional universe.
As we drove on to Hudson for a reception, I moved back to the
“follow car” with the advance people. Soon we arrived at the house of a
Republican stalwart named Rhona Charbonneau. It was a dark, cozy place,
decorated with enormous displays of tchotchkes--figurines, model cars,
baseballs, commemorative dishes--and filled with a happy, expectant crowd of
Party people. On the dining-room table was a cake in the shape of the White
House. Bush’s father, when he was President, had once done a similar event
here, and so had Barbara Bush.
Bush took up a place that had been made for him, with a microphone
and a spotlight, on a stair landing in the living room. He glanced around,
shooting little arrows of recognition to faces he knew, and then he gave a
short speech. It was the one he always gives, with slight situational
variations. He begins by talking about his wife, Laura, and his twin daughters,
Barbara and Jenna. He says that Laura used to be a public-school librarian and
that now “her most important job title isn’t First Lady, it’s Mom.” He says
that his daughters didn’t want him to run for President, but he is doing it
anyway because he is worried about children “who can’t access the American
dream.” And then you can tell that he’s working around to the end when he
brings up his twin daughters again. The last bit is a mock oath of office in
which he says that when he takes office he’ll put his hand on the Bible, laying
one hand out palm down to demonstrate, and swear, raising the other hand, to
restore honor and dignity to the office. The final words, delivered with his
hand raised, are “So help me God!”
Speaking from a podium isn’t Bush’s natural métier. He tends to
amble to the stage, rather than making a big ka-pow entrance. His gestures seem
over-rehearsed and a little awkward; for example, his standard emphasis move is
to bend his knees slightly, tilt back the upper half of his body, throw out his
palms, and deliver the line with a too predictable punch. His voice isn’t a
fabulous instrument, either: the range of tone and volume is too flat; it lacks
richness and roundness. You can sense him itching to connect individually, to
get back to having fun, as he speaks. At the Charbonneau house, while he was talking
he spotted me standing against a wall. If there’s such a thing as winking
invisibly, that’s what he did, and then he said to the audience, “There are
some folks, really decent folks in this country, who want to have a national
test. Not me!”
The big payoff was not the speech but the aftermath. Bush stepped
down into the living room and started greeting people. Now he was almost
glowing with the pleasure of being down in the room with his folks: pulling his
face close to other faces, draping his arms across shoulders, kissing old
ladies, registering exaggerated surprise or hilarity in response to what he was
told, remembering the names of people who hadn’t expected to have their names
remembered. With the men, baseball came up a lot; with the women, his mother.
In this and most other rooms, he was maybe the second-handsomest man--handsome
enough to be magnetic, but short of the dangerous territory of being pretty or
overtly sexual. He made you feel drawn to him, without feeling so strongly
drawn to him that it was frightening. He went through the house person by
person by person, interminably, making the sale every time. You could see how
this scene, endlessly repeated all over the country in 1999, could have caused
the world of Republican Party organizers to give him its heart.
When Bush finally left, he spotted me standing, a little
expectantly, next to the door of the bus. “Nicky, you want to ride with us?” he
said. “C’mon.” So I got back on, positioning myself in the narrow spot between
the front and back rooms of the bus. Bush signed baseballs for some of the
local politicians and then gave some interview time to the reporter from
Nashua. After a while, the bus pulled up at a hotel where he was going to be
the dinner speaker. He had changed out of his jacket and tie during the day.
Now he had to change back. To get to the dressing room, he had to brush past
me, and as he did he said, sarcastically, “Nicky, I can’t tell you what a
pleasure it’s been.”
I moved up toward the door of the bus so that I could get off. In
a moment, Bush reemerged from the back room. He was shaving with an electric
razor. “So who you writing this article for, Nicky?” he asked me. I told him it
was for The New Yorker--though we both knew he knew. “The Noooo Yawkuh,” he
said, rolling it out endlessly in a kind of Texan-imitating-an-upper-class-Brit
accent. “I can’t believe any of their readers would be interested in what I
have to say.” He grinned--yet another score. Then suddenly he was serious. “Do
you know how they got my grade transcript?” I said I didn’t. “Let me tell you,
some people at Yale heard about that. The little girl who did that is the same
little girl who asked me about mooning somebody.”
He was referring to an episode a couple of months earlier in which
someone from The New Yorker called to ask about a rumor that he had mooned the
opposition at a Yale-Princeton football game in the sixties. I thought the way
out of this moment would be to go back to the Nicky-and-the-Governor game we
had developed, in which I was supposed to play the city slicker as comic foil.
“What’s mooning, Governor?”
But Bush was not in the mood for jokes. His face was flushed and
hard. “Mooning’s when you drop your pants and show somebody your rear end,” he
said, “and the answer’s no.” And then, as suddenly as the storm had come on, it
passed. Bush finished shaving, shook my hand, reminded me that he’d seen Henry
Thomas at the Mansion the previous evening, and stepped off the bus. The last
time I saw him, he was working his way through a vast hotel dining room, bathed
in the golden light of a television crew, shaking every single hand.
The official story of George W. Bush’s life, often repeated, is
one of redemption: On his fortieth birthday, Bush dramatically renounces
alcohol, his religious faith begins to deepen, and he embarks on a journey to
his political destiny. It might help explain him better, though, to accept the
premise but change the terms: Bush’s redemption, indeed his whole story, makes
more sense if understood as an interplay of class and personality and locale,
rather than of God and man.
Whenever George W. Bush discusses his father, he visibly changes.
The grinning, let’s-have-fun look is gone. He alternates between two stances:
deep reverence, and blustery anger at those who have done the old man wrong. In
George W. Bush’s world, George H. W. Bush--President Bush--is a godlike figure,
held in genuine awe.
George H. W. Bush was born, in 1924, into a tightly enclosed,
rich, influential group: high-Protestant, English-stock, boarding-schooled,
Ivy-Leagued finance capitalists. To outsiders, members of this group look like
easy inheritors, but from the inside one of the group’s prime characteristics
is felt to be a preoccupation--obsession even--with competition, the
competition being usually limited, though, to its own membership. Within the
group, George H. W. Bush was the guy who always won, the effortless possessor
of the subculture’s most prized (though unquantifiable) qualities: character,
leadership, athleticism, and devotion to public service. Even his emigration to
Midland, Texas, in the late nineteen-forties, was, in context, more a daring
move than it was a self-exile or a spurning of his Wall Street destiny. In the
pages of this magazine forty years ago, John Bainbridge marvelled at “the
scores of eager, hard-driving young men, many of them graduates of Yale,
Princeton, or other Eastern universities, who have flowed to Midland.”
Bainbridge’s first example was Bush, identified as the son of a Connecticut
senator.
George W. Bush grew up in Midland and Houston, but he was a member
of the Texas Raj--a circle of Liedtkes and Bakers and Mosbachers, Texans who
had educational and financial ties to the Eastern Seaboard élite--and,
evidently, it was expected that he, the firstborn son, would, whether finally
resident in Texas or not, take up a position in his powerful ancestral
subculture. But this proved to be unexpectedly difficult, in a way that Bush
couldn’t have failed to find painful. He lived in Midland until he was
thirteen, by all accounts happily (except for the tragedy of his younger
sister’s death from leukemia). Then the family moved to Houston. Then he was
sent East to the family schools, Andover and Yale.
Bush almost immediately became a recognizable version of what he
is today, a hail fellow well met with a talent for establishing a jovial
connection with an unusually large number of people. The lead item on his
Andover résumé was head cheerleader. He was neither an outstanding student nor
an outstanding athlete, as his father had been. Also, he doesn’t seem to have
liked boarding school. “Andover was cold and distant and difficult,” Bush says
in his new autobiography, “A Charge to Keep.” “In every way, it was a long way
from home...forlorn is the best word to describe my sense of the place and my
initial attitude....It was a hard transition.”
Clay Johnson, then another Texan at Andover and still one of the
people closest to Bush, told me that when the time came to apply to college the
guidance counsellor at Andover told both of them that they really ought to
consider applying to the University of Texas as well as to Yale, the school
they had in mind--”which I took offense at,” Johnson said. The implication was
that they might not be able to cut it at Yale. Yale evidently didn’t agree,
because it accepted both boys (those were the days when more than three dozen
members of every Andover graduating class got in), and they became roommates.
Just recently, the question of Bush’s attitude toward Yale has
become complicated. In 1978, when Bush was running unsuccessfully for Congress
from Midland, his opponents beat up on him for his Eastern education. In 1994,
when he was running successfully for governor of Texas, he took an anti-Yale
position. Now that he’s running for President, he and his friends are
emphasizing his positive feelings about Yale. “George loved Yale,” another old
roommate, Terry Johnson, told me. “He was a fish totally in water. He thrived
at Yale.”
Still, even his friends will agree that over the years the Bush-Yale
relationship has been bumpy. He has a well-known antipathy toward the other
most famous member of the class of '68, Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of
State, who was the perfectly promising and eternally networking young man that
Bush wasn’t. During the nineteen-eighties, he came to believe that his father
should get an honorary degree from Yale. He would grouse about what was taking
them so long, and then, when the degree was finally granted, in 1991, he
reported to his friends, furiously, that at the official reception the wife of
the president of the university, Helen Whitney, a documentary filmmaker, had
refused to be in the same room with the President of the United States. In
1993, he initially refused to make a twenty-fifth-reunion contribution to Yale,
although in the end Clay Johnson talked him into it.
One may reconcile these accounts by surmising that Bush personally
may have had a hell of a good time at Yale but he was also aware that the tide
of the institution was running against his type. The leading item on his résumé
there was being president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the hardest-partying,
baddest-boy, most athlete-venerating of the campus fraternities. He had two
run-ins with the police as an undergraduate, once when he stole a Christmas
wreath from a New Haven storefront for the Deke house, and again when he and a
group of friends tore down the Princeton goalposts after a football game. He
was quoted as a public figure in the Yale Daily News (Strobe Talbott, chairman)
only in connection with the Dekes’ practice of branding a Delta into each
pledge’s back (“There’s no scarring mark physically or mentally,” he said).
And, as at Andover, he got to know lots and lots of people and made an unusual
number of close friendships.
After Bush’s class was admitted, Yale’s new president, Kingman
Brewster, Jr., a liberal-reformist New England patrician, brought in an
insurrectionary new director of admissions, only twenty-nine years old, named
R. Inslee Clark, Jr. Clark set about making Yale more of a national institution
dominated by public-school graduates who were picked for their academic
abilities. He made so many people mad that he lasted only five years in the
job, but by that time the revolution was substantially complete. A good way of
encapsulating the abrupt change from Old Yale to New Yale is this: George H. W.
Bush is the eldest of four brothers. All four went to Yale. George W. Bush is
the eldest of four brothers, too. He is the only one who went to Yale.
In the Old Yale, George W. Bush would have been a familiar and
lovable figure, someone who felt entirely comfortable there. Living with a set
of roommates from Andover, planning vaguely to go into business, being
obviously talented at personal relations, being an unserious student, a Republican,
the son, grandson, and cousin of dozens of Yalies--all of which applied to
Bush--would have put him right at the center of the Yale experience. By the
time Bush graduated, it put him at the periphery. In the fall of his junior
year, the Daily News reported that fewer than two hundred and twenty-five
people had attended the annual rush meeting at Delta Kappa Epsilon, down from
more than four hundred the year before.
What was interesting about the change at Yale--which was part of a
change along the same lines in the whole American élite--was that, while
everybody agreed that something big had happened, they disagreed over what the
something was. To most of the New Yale people, it was the advent of
meritocracy, a system in which brains would be put in their rightful place atop
the list of human attributes, and the deserving, not the inheritors, would get
the rewards. To Old Yale people like Bush and his friends, the change looked
more political--good old Republican Yale moving to the left. Terry Johnson told
me that a graduate teaching assistant had declared to a class he was in, after
the Watts riots of 1965, “The solution’s simple. It’s income redistribution.
That solves the problem.” Johnson--like Bush, an unusually fit and handsome
middle-aged man--shook his head. “Not ‘We have to focus on core things that
will solve the problem. Skills. Education. Discipline.’ No. Just ‘Take from the
rich and give to the poor.’ There was a lot of that then.” When he’s in an
anti-Yale mood, Bush talks about its being populated with “élitists” and
“snobs.” That would make him one of the ones being looked down upon. In the
venue in which his birth entitled him to noble rank, unexpected events had now
made him into a populist.
Yale was still Old enough, though, that it was assumed, without
being stated, that most of the students didn’t need to think about getting a
job, because before they got there they already belonged to a network that
could take care of that for them. Even in this context, Bush stood out as
unusually undirected. Sam Chauncey, in those days a young Yale administrator
who knew Bush, says, “I vividly remember sitting with him on the fence at
Davenport College, and he said, ‘I just don’t have the foggiest idea what I
want to do.’ ” Anyway, at that moment most Yale boys thought about life after
graduation mainly as a short-term question of how to avoid going off to fight
in the Vietnam War. A member of Bush’s Yale crowd named George Carpenter got
kicked out for a year for excessive hell-raising, which meant he temporarily
lost his student deferment. He was drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed in
action. “That made it real to us,” another of Bush’s close friends from Yale,
Roland Betts, says.
Bush returned to Houston and joined an Air National Guard unit
that was well populated with children of prominent Texans who were looking for
a respectable alternative to the front lines. Five years after finishing Yale,
Bush applied to the University of Texas law school, which turned him down, and
Harvard Business School, which accepted him. (Bush, a man with a long memory
for slights, told me that when he became governor he “decided to have a little
fun with the University of Texas folks. I said I didn’t get in. Somehow the
University of Texas overlooked the potential of George W. Bush, who now
approved its budget.”) At Harvard, as at Yale, he stood out for being
fun-loving, gregarious, and unambitious.
Then he moved to his childhood home, Midland, and became an
oilman--an unusual choice for a graduate of Harvard Business School in the
seventies. Back then, the cult of the entrepreneur was almost unimaginably
smaller than it is now; if you were smart and ambitious you went to work for a
big corporation or, more likely, a consulting firm or an investment bank. In
going to Midland, Bush wasn’t participating in a tiny but distinct East Coast
vogue of the day, either, as his father had done in going there. He was going
home, and following in his father’s footsteps.
Bush seems to have felt some impulse to conduct his life almost point
by point as his father had. He went to Andover. He went to Yale. At an
unusually young age, while still in college, he became engaged to a society
belle from home, just as his father had. He became a military pilot. He went
into the oil business in Midland financed by family connections, even giving
the company he started a strikingly similar name to the one his father had
started (George H. W. Bush: Zapata; George W. Bush: Arbusto--same language,
same number of syllables, other end of the alphabet). He ran for Congress.
But at every step things didn’t work out as well as they had for
the old man. Andover was difficult. He did not conquer Yale. His fiancée, Cathy
Wolfman, broke off their engagement. His military experience did not come
anywhere near qualifying him as a hero, as his father’s had. When his oil
company made an initial public offering, only a million two hundred thousand
dollars of the six million dollars in stock sold. He ran a strong race for
Congress, but he lost. A lot of the explanation for the difference between the
experience of the younger Bush and that of the elder lies in the individuals,
but it’s also true that they changed the rules on George W. Bush. By the time
he was out of adolescence, he was part of a displaced élite. Over one
generation, the Eastern Seaboard part of his world dramatically altered the
qualities it valued. It made these changes without becoming any less
competitive than it always had been; in fact, it probably became more
competitive. All these changes worked against him personally. In that endless
series of competitions, he kept coming up short. It was not merely in the
spiritual sense that George W. Bush needed redemption.
Several years ago, Karl Rove, the strategist who has guided every
detail of Bush’s political career, brought to his attention a book by Myron
Magnet called “The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the
Underclass,” which was published in 1993. The book seems to have made a strong
impression on Bush: Rove brought Magnet down to Austin in 1998 to talk to
Bush’s entire senior staff, then to Bush; and Bush talks about Magnet’s book
more often than he does the work of other anti-sixties authors, such as Marvin
Olasky, whom Rove brought to his attention, and David Horowitz, whom Bush found
on his own. Magnet blames just the kind of new academic liberals who were
rising at Yale when Bush was there for the problems of the poor in America
today: they challenged the moral verities so successfully as to engender, at
the very opposite end of the socioeconomic scale, a disastrous wholesale change
in the direction of permissiveness and relativism. “What I remember him telling
me at lunch was that he’d been through the sixties,” Magnet told me. “Been
there, done that. It was extremely destructive. The culture was at the root of
a huge proportion of America’s problems, especially the underclass.” So the
sixties had done something much worse than push him aside. They had ruined the
lives of millions of ordinary Americans, and even, it seems, been responsible
for his own wild years, even though Bush was never self-consciously a sixties
person. That would lend both an aspect of personal account-settling and a large
social purpose to Bush’s intent in 2000 to wrest national power from the
élitists and the snobs.
Bush never really made it in the oil business. His company got
washed out in the bust of the mid-eighties. He merged it with a bigger company
owned by two family friends from Ohio, and then sold that company to an outfit
known for putting people with famous names on its board. In a world where money
is how they keep score, he put in more than a decade, in very good times as
well as bad ones, with unusual access to capital at favorable terms because of
his family connections, and at the end of it he had amassed only a few hundred
thousand dollars--chicken feed for an independent oilman. Being an entrepreneur
wasn’t what redeemed him. Instead, it was a combination of two things: Texas,
and a new relation to his father which was much more workable than trying to
follow him.
Bush fit in in Texas, culturally, politically, and socially, far
more comfortably than he had in the Northeast. The whole package that being le
Texan homme moyen sensuel entails--the business-venerating conservative
politics, the devout non-High Church Christianity (Bush switched from
Episcopalian to Methodist after he married), the reverence for sports and
military heroes, the cowboy boots, the Western art, the bass fishing, the
country music, the practicality, the friendliness to strangers, the endless
deadpan ironic joking, the relatively low level of concern with the fine
gradations of social status--was perfect for Bush. Unlike his father a
generation earlier, it required no adjustment on his part to become a Texan,
and no leap of imagination on Texas’s part to think of him as one.
As Bush’s oil business was sinking, in the late eighties, his
father was starting a Presidential campaign. That was fortuitous timing. Bush
moved to Washington and took up a post as a kind of official kibbitzer at the
Bush for President office. He didn’t have specific responsibilities; his job
was to look out single-mindedly for his father’s interests, travel and make
speeches on his behalf, and keep an eye on the hired campaign staff, especially
the campaign manager, Lee Atwater. He’d sit in his office with the door open,
his boots up on the desk, a tin of Copenhagen snuff near at hand, gathering
intelligence and, when necessary, kicking a little butt, just to make sure the
staff knew they were subordinate to the President. The idea was that George W.
Bush was especially useful to his father because he was tougher, more
conservative, more political, and had a better instinct for the public mood.
Having failed in his years of efforts to be exactly like his father, he now
succeeded at a different project: making up for the elder Bush’s shortcomings,
chiefly excessive gentlemanliness, and avenging his losses. It wasn’t exactly a
dignified role, because it required playing the boss’s son very heavily, well
into middle age; Jeb Bush, by contrast, though seven years younger, was in
Florida patiently building up an independent political base.
When the election was over and Bush had moved back to Texas, he’d
still pop up to Washington sometimes and set errant employees of his father’s
straight, particularly if he suspected them of self-aggrandizement--the
best-known example being the role he played in persuading John Sununu to resign
as White House chief of staff. Not long ago, I went to see Sununu, who’s an
intensely proud man, to ask him what had really happened, and he took pains to
emphasize that quitting was his own decision, that George W. Bush was only one
of several people who had talked with him about it, and that Jeb was the Bush
son with whom he generally discussed political matters. But, yes, they had
talked: “He fell on the side of those who were encouraging me not to stay,”
Sununu said. “I’ve tried to think back to that conversation. I don’t recall
exact quotes. Being a buffer, taking lightning for the President--that analogy
came up in some of my conversations. It was a very amicable conversation.”
After Sununu was gone, Bush tried, in vain, to put a little more
fire in the belly of the 1992 reelection campaign (Lee Atwater had died)--for
example, by hunting around for evidence of incompetence by Ross Perot’s
computer company. He even moved back to Washington briefly. But by that time
Bush’s redemption had taken another enormous step forward. Just after the 1988
election, he found out that Eddie Chiles, an old friend of his father’s from
the oil business, wanted to sell the Texas Rangers. Bush seems to have regarded
this as a political opportunity as much as a business opportunity--a way of
putting himself before the public so that he could run for office. In 1989, he
told Laurence I. Barrett, of Time, “My biggest liability in Texas is the
question ‘What’s the boy ever done? So he’s got a famous father and ran a small
oil company. He could be riding on Daddy’s name if he ran for office.’ Now I
can say, ‘I’ve done something--here it is.’”
Because his record as a businessman in Midland was not
confidence-inspiring, Bush, even though he was the son of the sitting
President, did not have the ability to raise a lot of investment capital in
Texas. What he did have was that special ability to make extraordinarily loyal
friends. The biggest investors in the Rangers deal were his old Deke friend
from Yale, Roland Betts, and Betts’s partner, Tom Bernstein, former financiers
of a string of Disney movies, and later the founders of the Chelsea Piers
sports complex in Manhattan. Bush is often portrayed as having been set up with
the Rangers by Richard Rainwater, the Forth Worth-based big daddy of Texas
investing, but the real story is more interesting: Bush pitched Rainwater on
the Rangers deal; Rainwater turned him down; Peter Ueberroth, then the
commissioner of baseball, interceded with Rainwater, because he thought it
wouldn’t look good for Bush to buy the Rangers with out-of-town money, and
persuaded him to get involved. Rainwater then recruited a bottom-fishing Dallas
investor named Rusty Rose to join the investor group as a co-manager so that
Bush wouldn’t be solely responsible for running the team. In 1989, Bush took
out a bank loan to buy a six-hundred-thousand-dollar stake in the Rangers,
which he sold nine years later for fifteen million dollars. In 1990, Bush sold
the last of his oil stock (shortly before the company reported a big quarterly
loss) and used the proceeds to pay off his loan.
In the management of the Rangers, Rusty Rose was the financial
guy; Bush was the public face of the team, in charge of dealing with fans and
the press and politicians. This was especially important because part of what
made the deal attractive to investors was the prospect of getting the citizens
of Arlington, Texas, to approve a tax surcharge that would help pay for the
construction of a new stadium for the Rangers.
Bush travelled around Texas, endlessly making speeches about the
Rangers (meanwhile making himself known, too), and, most nights when the team
was playing, sitting in an open owner’s box down next to the field, grinning,
shaking hands with fans, cheering for the Rangers, razzing their opponents, and
handing out baseball cards that he’d had made with his picture on them. He was
the head cheerleader again, and he was good at it.
Meanwhile, he was already in heavy consultation with Karl Rove,
whom he had met back in the seventies, in Houston, through his father. He had
thought about running for governor of Texas in 1990, and had decided not to,
because Betts and the other investors wanted him to see through the turnaround
of the Rangers, and because there would be negative synergy between his
campaign and his father’s Presidency. In 1994, with the elder Bush out of
office and the Rangers thriving in their new stadium, he did run, and his
brother Jeb ran for governor of Florida, too.
Bush’s opponent was Ann Richards, who was probably best known
nationally for making a speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in
which she made fun of his father for having been “born with a silver foot in
his mouth.” Though popular in polls, Richards was an improbable figure as
governor of Texas; she was a liberal and relatively inexperienced in politics.
Texas is the most conservative big state--Karl Rove sent me a paper he wrote in
1997 neatly demonstrating that Republicans hold a substantial natural electoral
advantage there.
Rove arranged a series of tutorials in Texas governance for Bush,
and together they picked four campaign themes: education, juvenile justice,
tort reform, and welfare reform. He relentlessly stuck to them; he had what’s
known in the trade as good message discipline. Richards’s strategy was to get
him to lose his well-advertised temper by constantly taunting him about the
lightness of his record. He never did. In a Republican landslide year, he won
by eight points--but his younger brother, who had been planning his political
life for much longer, just barely lost, having staked out a place for himself
that was too far to the right for Florida voters. Somewhat to the surprise of
the Bush circle, George, not Jeb, was suddenly the leading politician in the
family.
In discussions of George W. Bush’s Presidential candidacy, it is
often pointed out that Texas has a weak governorship--a grace note that gets
struck a little too quickly and dutifully. The Texas constitution was adopted
in 1876--in other words, just as the yoke of Reconstruction was being thrown
off. T. R. Fehrenbach (who, by the way, has advised Bush on education) writes
in “Lone Star,” the standard history of Texas, that the governor “was left
awesome responsibilities but few powers.” The legislature is permitted to meet
for only a hundred and forty days every other year. Many offices that are
filled by gubernatorial appointment in other states are independently elected
in Texas, so the governor doesn’t have a cabinet. The lieutenant governor, who
presides over the state senate and chairs the board that prepares the budget,
is more powerful than the governor. One state-government budget analyst made a
count for me of the number of people who report to the governor of Texas, and
came up with a hundred and thirty-seven. Bush’s budget director, Albert
Hawkins, estimated the number at about two hundred. By contrast, the governor
of Arkansas has fourteen hundred people working for him; the mayor of Chicago,
forty-two thousand people.
The backlash against Reconstruction created not just a weak
governorship but a one-party system--no Republicans. Together, these led to a
tradition of pragmatic, conservative consensus politics in which the
business-civic establishment, pursuing economic development as its overriding
goal, has an ongoing power that doesn’t fluctuate much with each election
cycle. Today Texas is a two-party state, but the old style remains. The
governor (in particular, Bush) will even campaign for legislators of the
opposing party who have been supportive during the session.
The constitution gives Texas governance a particular flavor.
Practically everything happens during the biennial legislative session--January
through late May or early June in odd-numbered years--and the plupart of
practically everything happens at the very end of the session. The
citizen-legislators descend on Austin from far and wide (Texas is larger than
France), and the vicinity of the capital takes on the atmosphere of a
caravansary: jammed hotels and bars, drinking, parties, gossip, intrigue, love
affairs, all building up to the end-of-session climax.
Bush did not govern in the Washington-executive manner, in which
the head of state begins the year by issuing a great blueprint for all
government policy and spending. He opened his governorship by issuing a “budget
policy message” of three double-spaced pages, rather than a budget. Still, his
first session was a big success. He made himself an ally, even a protégé, of
the speaker, Pete Laney, and the lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock--both
Democrats. He was friendly and accessible to the legislators, as Richards had
not been. He’d take them to ballgames or invite them for a meal at the Mansion.
The Texas economy was better than it had been for a long time. In the areas of
all four campaign promises, the legislature passed major bills, and all four
bills were distinctly influenced by Bush, even if they weren’t his, exactly.
Bush’s signature issue, education, is a perfect example of the
Texas way. Education reform in Texas began in the mid-eighties, when a
Democratic governor appointed Ross Perot, who was then a Republican, to run a
commission on Texas schools. Since then, and especially since a series of
lawsuits forced the legislature to equalize funding between school districts,
education reform has been the big item in every session of the legislature.
Texas has supported education reform partly because the business
interests, terrified by the oil busts of the eighties, want a state economy
built around a literate and numerate workforce. There aren’t any teachers’
unions in Texas, only “associations,” which removes from the equation some of
the automatic conservative suspicion of public education. Also, Texas has a
much less entrenched class system than the East does. Everybody at least
pretends to be just a generation away from small-town lower-middle-class life,
which revolves around high-school sports. Considering the size of the state,
there still aren’t a lot of private schools. The typical prosperous Texan has a
better feeling for the problems of a kid in public school than the typical
prosperous New Yorker. This is evidently the case with Bush, who went to Texas
public schools and who learned in the East what it feels like to be branded as
inferior in school. Nobody would accuse him of having developed a mastery of
all areas of Texas public policy, but he did learn the ins and outs of
education.
The over-all effect of all those years of education-reform efforts
in Texas has been to create a much more centralized system, of the kind that
Bush accused me of liking. Under a “Robin Hood” law, the rich districts have to
give serious money to the poor ones. The state has produced central curriculum
standards, and has commissioned tests specifically based on them. Every student
in the public schools has to take the Texas tests in reading and math from the
third through eighth grades. The scores are tabulated by race and class; each
district has to maintain, at a certain level, not just its average scores but
the scores of its black, Hispanic, and poor students or suffer hard
consequences. And minority scores have gone up dramatically.
Bush did not invent this accountability system, but he has
supported it strongly. When the right made runs against curriculum standards,
state tests, and the keeping of separate data for minority students so that
districts could be forced to take measures to raise their performance, Bush
defended the system. He could pick out a conservative cause or two to push for
each session, such as providing state financing to charter schools, and get
credit for the over-all results produced by the more liberal aspects of education
reform while maintaining his conservative credentials.
In his second session as
governor, Bush, high on the success of the first session, tried something much
more ambitious, and he failed. As a matter of holy writ, Texas has no state
income tax. The schools have to rely mainly on property taxes, which have been
rising fast. Bush wanted to shift the tax burden dramatically away from
property taxes, which would help both middle-class homeowners and big oil
companies (three-fifths of property-tax revenues come from business). He picked
up an idea that Charls Walker, a Washington corporate super-lobbyist (and
native Texan), has been pushing for years--a value-added tax on goods and
services--as the way to make up the revenue lost from property-tax cuts. This
would have been an achievement of a different order of magnitude from the first
session’s, because now Bush was trying to initiate a major policy on his own,
not accelerate and modify the course of actions that Bullock and Laney and the
legislature were already taking.
However, Bush hadn’t anticipated how furious the opposition would
be from those in the business-civic establishment who would have seen their
taxes go up. Pete Laney, the speaker, appointed a special committee on
property-tax reform, which simply shelved Bush’s bill and wrote a new version,
which Bush endorsed and campaigned for. It passed in the House, but the Senate
passed a much weaker version, and in conference--after a typically frenetic
end-of-session fiesta of lobbying, including individual pleas to members by
Bush--it died.
Bush was able to save face by getting a much smaller property-tax
cut passed, which wound up not having much net effect on most homeowners’
bills. The episode shows a major weakness on his part--he couldn’t pass what
was by far the biggest proposal of his governorship--but it also shows some
strengths. He didn’t brood or sulk. He got something. And he pushed to make
sure that the tax cut was directed at ordinary homeowners, which he didn’t have
to do. Still, the failure of the tax bill was a big loss. Sam Howe Verhovek,
writing in the Times at the end of the session, called it “the first big
setback of his gubernatorial term” and suggested that the defeat would hurt
Bush if he made a run for the Presidency in 2000.
But then, curiously, it didn’t matter. Right after the session
ended, Bush began showing up in national polls as the most popular of the
possible Republican Presidential candidates. Under the obsessively detailed
direction of Karl Rove, he put himself on display to the key elements of the
party--speaking at fund-raisers around the country, working Republican
governors’ meetings, campaigning for senators and congressmen, forging
alliances with such important Christian conservatives as Pat Robertson and Ralph
Reed. In 1998, he ran for reelection and crushed his liberal Democratic
opponent, Garry Mauro. Not very long after his second inauguration, Bush, whose
entire official experience in public life consisted of one term as governor of
a state with a weak governorship, had been essentially anointed as the
Republican nominee.
Bush spent 1998 and 1999 winning over a tough-minded, committed
group of political insiders, the kind of people who know that they’re going to
bet on a horse in the Republican Presidential campaign. If you were one of
those people in late 1998 and you looked at George W. Bush, you would see a man
who not only just got reelected governor of the second-biggest state in the
country with almost seventy per cent of the vote but who led the entire
Republican ticket in Texas--seventeen other people--to victory. That’s right:
there are no Democratic statewide officeholders in Texas today. You would see a
man who had cut deeply into constituencies the Republicans have trouble with,
notably women (Bush got sixty-five per cent of the female vote in 1998) and
Hispanics (forty-nine per cent). Twenty-seven per cent of registered Democrats
voted for Bush, which brings to mind the possibility that he could have a
Ronald Reagan-like appeal to swing voters nationally. You might have met George
Bush, seen him perform at a fund-raiser or been brought down to Austin by Rove
for a meeting with him, at which he’d have been more impressive than you’d
expected him to be--mature, sincere, and decently well versed, apparently no
longer the hotheaded kid of his father’s Presidential campaigns.
Counterposed to all this was the Party’s grim situation in
Washington, where the Republicans had bet very heavily on President Clinton’s
impeachment, had lost seats in the congressional elections, and had watched in
horror after the elections as first Newt Gingrich and then his successor as
Speaker of the House, Bob Livingston, melted down in public. If you were
looking for somebody who was the opposite of Newt Gingrich, you couldn’t do
much better than Bush: he was normal, he was fit, he was middle-of-the-country,
he wasn’t frighteningly ambitious, he was faithful to his wife, as an
officeholder he made deals not war, he was comforting not scary, and, if you
thought about it, maybe Gingrich had been a little too brainy and bookish all
along.
This non-primary primary fed on itself. Bush’s fund-raising
operation officially opened for business on March 7, 1999. Within a month, it
had raised six million dollars just in contributions at the thousand-dollar
maximum, from early bet-placers, Texas friends, loyal names from Bush family
Rolodexes, lobbyists, baseball friends, Yale friends, Andover friends, friends
of Bush’s Republican governor friends--a great outpouring of love, during times
so good that it was easy for the members of the
professional-managerial-entrepreneurial class and their families to write
thousand-dollar checks. (By the end of 1999, when the Bush fund-raising total
stood at sixty-three million dollars, nearly eighty-five per cent of the total
had come in the form of five-hundred-dollar and thousand-dollar contributions.)
Bush’s enormous fund-raising success sent a signal that loosened more
endorsements from Republican politicians in the states and in Congress. The
contributions and the endorsements generated awestruck press attention and
scared opponents like Elizabeth Dole and Dan Quayle out of the race long before
a vote had been cast.
During the last six months of 1999, Bush delivered a series of
speeches that touched on all the main policy areas of the federal government.
What emerged in the highest relief from these were two slogans that denoted the
main distinctive theme of his campaign: “compassionate conservatism” and
“prosperity with a purpose.” These stick in the mind because no Presidential
candidate in decades has dared to run on compassion, or even mention it
prominently. Even today, only a Republican could do it--coming from a Democrat,
people would think that higher taxes were on the way.
For Bush, though, compassion has a lot of political benefits. It
instantly puts to rest the question of what his message is. It helps to
position him as a moderate for the general election. It wins over the liberal
press, assuages Republican women who find the Gingrich-Tom DeLay-Dick Armey
wing of the Party too struttingly confrontational, and appeals to minority
voters. The non-obvious constituency for compassionate conservatism is
evangelicals, with whom the imagery of love and redemption and higher purpose
resonates.
Inside the Republican Party, compassionate conservatism--the idea,
if not the precise slogan--long predates Bush’s interest. In 1983, at the
height of the Reagan revolution, an Indiana congressman named Dan Coats, a
former aide to Dan Quayle, conservative and devoutly Christian, began to push
for a distinctly Republican way of running anti-poverty programs (as an
alternative to simply abolishing them). The idea would be to fund groups that
promote “values,” because they can turn people’s lives around by getting them
to give up self-destructive behavior. Most of these groups have a religious
affiliation. In the nineties, after Coats had been elected to the Senate, he
started the Project for American Renewal, which brought together Christian
groups, conservative politicians, and intellectuals (mostly Catholic)
interested in a revival of “civil society.” Bush’s chief speechwriter, Mike
Gerson, used to work for Coats. Bush’s chief domestic-affairs adviser, Stephen
Goldsmith, who just stepped down as mayor of Indianapolis, started a program
there called the Front Porch Alliance, run by a former Coats aide, that funded
religious anti-poverty programs. Bush made his big compassionate-conservatism
speech last summer at a Front Porch Alliance event in Indianapolis.
These ideas appeal deeply to Bush. They have three hooks, all
powerful for him: the recognition of the force of religious faith, especially
as an influence on behavior; the implication, which runs through most of the
faith-based social-program literature, that the liberal élitists took a crack
at the country’s social problems in the sixties and botched the job; and the
extension of Bush’s own life story to millions of troubled people at the other
end of American society. Faith-based social programs offer a very Bush mixture
of redemption (for the devout poor) and competition (with liberal do-gooders).
It doesn’t necessarily follow, though, that the rhetoric of
compassionate conservatism would unerringly lead to a major change in direction
for the federal government. The main mechanism for compassionate conservatism
would be government grants to faith-based social programs--some of which
already get government grants and have for years. It’s possible to make a lot
of fuss about compassionate conservatism without changing existing policy much.
The test will come once Bush is in office. (The same goes for Al Gore, who has
also endorsed the idea of new government help for faith-based social programs.)
The truth is that although Bush may turn out to be another Reagan
in his ability to attract voters, it’s already obvious that he isn’t going to
be another Reagan in the sense of trying to revolutionize the national polity.
Even prospectively, he doesn’t propose anything dramatic. He says constantly
that he wants to do a few things and do them well. He likes to describe himself
as a problem solver. He wants to increase the defense budget, but only
modestly, much less than the Republican right would like. In foreign policy, he
would be a “fierce free trader,” but that’s what Clinton has been. He would do
less humanitarian intervention abroad (no Haitis in the Bush Administration),
but he would be a strong internationalist. He would tilt slightly toward
Taiwan, but not enough to disrupt trade with China. He would cut the top income-tax
rate, but not to the extent that Reagan did. He would protect Social Security.
On education, he has a lot of small ideas that don’t seem to add up to the kind
of major commitment of government resources that Texas undertook on his watch.
What George W. Bush really offers us is himself. When Republicans
talk about him, what you hear is an intense loathing for Bill Clinton, and an
equally intense desire to take back the White House. Things about Bush that
might ordinarily appear unremarkable--that may, in fact, be true of you and
most people you know--are rhetorically elevated to Presidential qualifications
by the implied comparison with Clinton. Bush is happily and faithfully married.
He has close friends. He is “comfortable in his own skin.” He wants to be
President, but he doesn’t need to be President. He doesn’t read polls and
conduct focus groups before every move he makes. When there is a decision to
make, he chooses the option that he thinks represents the right thing to do. He
would conduct the Presidency with the principles of dignity and honor in mind.
Bush’s opponents and the press have put a lot of effort into
finding some Presidentially disqualifying datum about him: he may have used
cocaine, he doesn’t know the names of world leaders. Actually, the main
argument against him is hiding in plain sight: compared with other Presidents,
he just hasn’t done very much in his life. If he takes office this time next
year, he’ll come to the Presidency with a lighter résumé than anybody has in at
least a hundred years: Helping to manage a professional sports franchise and a
term and a half as governor of Texas. Openly admitted drift before that. No
experience handling a crisis or solving a major conflict. Good political
instincts and a gift for connecting with people. A decent, trustworthy guy. Not
especially knowledgeable or curious, but a quick study. Growing. That’s it.
The idea of Bush as President runs counter to the American
tradition of giving the job to someone who has spent a lifetime being outstanding.
The tradition encompasses even the Presidents we think of as lightweights:
Harry Truman had held political office for more than twenty years before he
became President, in 1945; Warren Harding was in public life from 1899 until he
became President, in 1921; John F. Kennedy was a member of Congress (first the
House, then the Senate) from 1947 until he became President, in 1961. Ronald
Reagan rose from obscurity to become a prominent actor, the head of a labor
union, a two-term governor of California, and a three-time Presidential
candidate before he took office. George H. W. Bush was the kind of person
friends were predicting would one day be President practically from his
teen-age years onward. Dwight Eisenhower spent his whole life in public service
and organized the conquest of Europe. George W. Bush’s ascension would
represent the apotheosis of an ordinary man.
Karl Rove has a riff, which he gives to anybody who will listen,
entitled “It’s 1896.” Every national political reporter has heard it, to the
extent that it induces affectionate eye-rolling when it comes up. “It’s 1896”
is based on Rove’s reading of the work of a small school of conservative
revisionist historians of the Gilded Age (that is, historians who love the
Gilded Age), one of whom, Lewis Gould, taught a graduate course that Rove took
at the University of Texas.
Here’s the theory, delivered at Rove’s mile-a-minute clip:
“Everything you know about William McKinley and Mark Hanna”--the man elected
President in 1896 and his political Svengali--”is wrong. The country was in a
period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were
changing. The economy was changing. We’re at the same point now: weak
allegiances to parties, a rising new economy.”
Interested, I went to the library and read up on McKinley. There
are a couple of big differences between this campaign and the one in 1896: it
was a recession campaign run on economic issues, and McKinley’s main proposal,
high protectionist tariffs, runs opposite to Bush’s position on the same issue.
But the similarities are indeed striking--so striking as to make you wonder
whether Rove deliberately followed the Hanna-McKinley playbook as he coached
George W. Bush through his astonishingly rapid transformation from aimless
Presidential son to putative President.
McKinley was a man with an “amiable disposition” and a “winning
demeanor,” great at political handshaking events, who was elected and then
reelected governor of the most important state between the coasts, Ohio. He was
unusually popular, for a Republican, with urban workers and ethnic minorities.
When he ran into financial trouble, his rich friends took up a collection and
bailed him out. He even proposed a big reduction in Ohio property taxes.
Mark Hanna, who devoted himself full time to making McKinley
President, engineered a “front-porch campaign,” involving a staged procession
of prominent visitors to McKinley’s home in Canton, which worked so well that
McKinley was able to lock up the Republican nomination early. Then Hanna systematically
raised much more money than any previous Presidential campaign ever had, and
used it to fund an unprecedentedly heavy media campaign (in the form of widely
distributed pamphlets) and a massive organizational effort in the states. And,
in winning, McKinley ushered in a period in which the Republicans, as the Party
representing business prosperity in the new industrial age, controlled the
White House right up to the Great Depression, with the exception of Woodrow
Wilson’s two terms.
Lewis Gould has noted hopefully that McKinley is rising into the
middle ranks of Presidential greatness, but the main event of his Presidential
term, the Spanish-American War, caught him flat-footed. George W. Bush
represents the hope not so much of a redirection of the federal government as
of another Republican restoration, one that would put the White House back in
the hands of the party of business and--by bringing suburban, female, and
minority voters into the Republican coalition--perhaps do so for a good long time.
For Bush himself, it would be a restoration in more than just that
way. People who know him say he’s itching to take on Al Gore in the general
election. When Bush talks about Gore, he does so in a way that makes it clear
that he has him pegged as a member of the liberal-intellectual coterie that
rose to power in the sixties, at Yale and elsewhere. He has been quoted more
than once as saying that he realized Gore didn’t have the right touch when he
read an interview Gore gave to Louis Menand for The New Yorker--an interview in
which Gore dropped the name Merleau-Ponty. Bush told an old friend who had
lunch with him in Austin last spring that he can’t wait to go “mano a mano”
with Gore. When asked to state succinctly the difference between Gore and himself,
he’ll usually say that he went to San Jacinto Junior High School, in Midland,
Texas, and Gore went to St. Albans, in Washington, D.C. It’s going to be a
regular guy versus an archetypal member of the new élite--no contest.
But, of course, George W. Bush is not just a non-member of the new
élite; he’s a fully born-in member of the old élite. If not his class,
certainly his family, discussed in almost genetic terms, is an explicit part of
the argument for his candidacy. It has to be: imagine how thin his claim on the
Presidency would be without the family connection. Many of the people around
Bush believe that the American people realize they made a mistake in denying
George H. W. Bush a second term in 1992, and now they have a chance to remedy
it. “People remember the integrity and rectitude of his father, of his family,”
C. Boyden Gray, an old Bush Administration hand, told me. “He comes by that by
virtue of having the name Bush.”
A couple of months before I travelled with Bush in New Hampshire,
I was granted a brief telephone interview. His sharpest, most alive answer by
far came in response to the question of what lesson he had taken from his
father’s defeat in 1992. “First lesson, polls change,” he said. “I take nothing
for granted. Second, we’ve got a strategy for the timing of policy speeches.
It’s important to have a strategy and set the debate. In many ways, they didn’t
spend the capital wisely. It was reactive in many ways. It wasn’t necessarily
my dad’s fault. It was a two-front war. You die a death of a thousand cuts in
politics. Buchanan inflicted a lot of cuts, and then Perot picked it up. He got
defined as somebody who didn’t care about the domestic economy and how people
were doing at home. They defined him before he could define himself.”
Bush is obviously out to rectify those mistakes. If his father was too politically passive, too concerned with foreign affairs, too unconnected to people’s daily lives, well, George W. Bush is going to be the opposite on every count. In fact, if the 2000 election is a replay of 1992, the roles, as cast by George W. Bush, will be reversed: Gore, the essence-of-Washington, excessively loyal Vice-President, surrounded by high-priced, self-serving political consultants, plays George H. W. Bush. Bush, the politically gifted, empathetic, cunning Southern governor, with his cadre of totally loyal and subservient aides, plays Bill Clinton. The result would be elaborately satisfying. A Bush would be back in the White House. Those ethereal qualities that Bush’s class thinks of as innate to its members--good character and leadership--would be enshrined as more important than earnest book learning. And George W. Bush would have progressed from trying to emulate his father, to protecting him from his shortcomings, to, finally, outdoing him, which might have been the idea all along.
What would happen if we saw the man he
really is?
Toward the end of his political career, Senator Albert Gore, Sr.,
wrote a couple of books, one on the eve of the 1970 Senate campaign and the
other, which was longer and told a bit more “with the bark on,” as they say in
Tennessee, a couple of years later. To read them now is to be taken back to a
time in American politics when notes were struck that nobody strikes anymore.
Senator Gore grew up on a struggling farm in the hills of middle
Tennessee. In the evenings, the family would sit around a kerosene lamp, and
the father would talk about his hero--William Jennings Bryan, the Great
Commoner. Senator Gore managed to cobble together an education for himself over
many years, by working his way first through a local teachers’ college, then a
night law school conducted at the Y.M.C.A. in Nashville. It was there that he
met his wife, Pauline, who was working her way through Vanderbilt Law School by
waiting on tables in a coffee shop in the evenings. Gore’s first full-time job,
as a schoolteacher, paid seventy-five dollars a month.
The Depression hit the Gore family very hard. Senator Gore’s
father, fearing for the stability of the local banks in Smith County,
Tennessee, divided his savings among three of them. All three failed, and he
lost everything. When the future Senator’s father went to sell his crops that
year, he made eighty-nine dollars, and Gore remembered the scene of “grown men
who were so desperate the tears streamed down their cheeks as they stood with
me at the window to receive their meager checks for a full year’s work.” During
that time, George H. W. Bush, the father of this year’s other Presidential
candidate, was a student at Greenwich Country Day School, to which he was
driven every morning by his family’s chauffeur.
Salvation arrived, in the form of Franklin Roosevelt and the New
Deal. F.D.R. brought electricity to rural Tennessee. F.D.R. proposed higher
taxes on corporations and the rich. F.D.R. made a speech about the South in
which he said, “When you come right down to it, there is little difference
between the feudal system and the fascist system.” Gore was elected to the
United States Congress, and later to the Senate, where he fought constantly
against tax cuts, privatization, tight money, Wall Street, and the Federal
Reserve Board. When, for example, he heard that John F. Kennedy, the newly
elected President, was going to appoint a Wall Street man, C. Douglas Dillon,
as Secretary of the Treasury, he retreated to his farm in Carthage, Tennessee,
and wrote Kennedy a blistering letter, warning that “such an appointment would
be a signal that you had given up the goals of a truly Democratic
Administration.” Gore’s oldest granddaughter, Karenna Gore Schiff, remembers
him once introducing her to a new farmhand who hesitated to shake her hand
because his was dirty. Gore laughed and motioned for her to shake hands anyway,
advising her to say, “That’s all right--I’m a Democrat.”
Gore lost his seat in 1970, to a rising young man of the
Republican Party, Bill Brock. The race was widely seen as a last hurrah for
old-fashioned Southern populism. In Tennessee, the Democratic Party, which had
dominated state politics for all of living memory, and which, indeed, had
practically been invented in Tennessee (Andrew Jackson lived within a hundred
miles of where Senator Gore was born), seemed to have expired practically
overnight. In 1966, the Republicans took one of Tennessee’s Senate seats. In
1970, they took the other, and the governorship, too. The old dream of Southern
liberals, which animates Senator Gore’s writings, was that if they could ever
kill off the Jim Crow system blacks and poor whites could make common, populist
cause against the Bourbons and their moneyed allies in New York. Now Jim Crow
was dead, and the opposite was happening: the white South was going Republican.
Gore saw his last race as a primal struggle between good and evil; in his
post-defeat book, he approvingly quotes David Halberstam, who wrote, in
Harper’s, of Brock’s campaign slogan, “Bill Brock Believes”: “Believes is the
code word for Nigger.”
From the Democratic point of view, the Party was the victim of its
own success. By taxing and spending, it had managed to get some money into the
hands of the flat-busted country farmers of the Depression South. Now they were
doing better, beyond their dreams, really, and a lot of their children weren’t
farmers anymore. They had gone to college, thanks to programs the Democrats had
passed, and modern industry had come to the South, thanks to the Democrats’
ending segregation and building dams and power plants and highways (Albert Gore
was the chief sponsor of the bill that created the interstate-highway system),
and they had white-collar jobs and were living in new houses in the
suburbs--and voting Republican.
Not long ago in Nashville, I went to see James Neal, the former
Watergate prosecutor, who has been a friend of the Gore family since the
nineteen-fifties and is now the lawyer for Al Gore, in the matter of his
fund-raising in 1996. He told me that when he was growing up--the son of a
middle-Tennessee farmer, in a house with no indoor plumbing--his father used to
point out to him a man named Roark who lived in their part of the country, and
say, “Look, son! There’s a Republican!” Neal was telling me this story in his
office, on the twentieth floor of a plate-glass Nashville skyscraper. He was
wearing bluejeans and scuffed boots and chewing on an unlit cigar that looked
about a foot long. “He must have pointed that guy out to me twenty times,” Neal
said. “It was like he was a man with two heads. Now I see these people out in
Brentwood who drive a Lexus, who belong to my country club, and they curse the
government. And I sit and listen to them! Drive a Lexus and condemn the party
that got you there. That’s what it amounts to.”
If you drive the fifty miles from Nashville out to Carthage, the
plain little town that is still the Gore family seat, you see that almost
everything built in the last forty years is grander than almost everything
built before then, and that the new construction--the malls and the
subdivisions--is creeping out toward Carthage. Nissan and Saturn have built
factories not too far away, something inconceivable in the stone-agrarian South
of the Depression. In the 1996 Presidential election, the hapless Dole-Kemp
ticket was just one point behind in Al Gore’s old congressional district.
This isn’t just a regional story, or one of particular interest
because of who is running for President. Most of the dominant national
politicians of the past decade are people whose formative experience as young
politicians was in figuring out how to play the South’s abrupt and dramatic
shift from Democratic to Republican. This is the story of George H. W. Bush’s
political life, and of George W. Bush’s, and of Jeb Bush’s, and of Newt
Gingrich’s and Dick Armey’s and Tom DeLay’s--they were in the rising group; and
then in the falling group, the one that had to deal with the foundation’s being
knocked out from under it, are Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Gore’s entire
political life has been about trying to survive within a tradition that he was
born into and watched die. In that situation, you either become very, very
nimble or very, very careful. Al Gore himself once wrote, “I grew up in a
determinedly political family, in which I learned at an early age to be very
sensitive--too sensitive, perhaps--to what others were thinking, and to notice
carefully--maybe too carefully--the similarities and differences between my way
of thinking and that of the society around me.”
At least in his writings, Albert Gore, Sr., always insisted that
the South could be the most liberal region of the country and that the
post-civil-rights return to economic populism was still on the way. In one of
his books, though, he did make a concession to changing times. He proposed
passing the torch to a new type of populist:
This reconstruction of our country from within calls for guidance
by men who live neither in the memories of the past nor in the emotions of the
present; it calls for guidance by men who are pre-eminently thinkers, men who,
let it be said very simply, are concerned with a future-oriented understanding
of things--it calls for guidance, if you will, by the intellectuals who over
the years have voiced many of the latent convictions and beliefs of the poor
and downtrodden.
Al Gore was intimately involved in his father’s last campaign and
therefore in the final bitterness of it. He travelled with the old man. When
his father decided that he needed to buy television ads, Gore appeared in them,
wearing a military uniform and being told, “Son, always love your country.”
Although Gore’s service in Vietnam is usually held up as an example of his
devotion to his father--he enlisted in part because it seemed required by the
1970 campaign--Halberstam’s article in Harper’s suggests that the father might
actually have liked the idea of running a campaign alongside a son who refused
to go to Vietnam. But when changing times took out the elder Gore the younger
one had to play his ambitions quite differently. What the father wrote about
the advent of an emotionless, intellectual, futurist strain of populist would
have been the script--and, beneath Al Gore’s many protective layers, it remains
the script, as I discovered when I was able to talk with him. He displayed a
degree of thoughtfulness and study, and also of abstraction from the daily
world, that is astonishing in a Presidential candidate in mid-campaign.
In the middle of June, Al Gore unveiled a new theme for his
Presidential campaign in a speech at the New York Historical Society, on the
West Side of Manhattan. If you haven’t spent time in the vicinity of a sitting
Vice-President of the United States--in White House lingo, a v-potus--it’s
surprising how much apparatus is involved. Air Force Two sits on the runway at
LaGuardia, city streets get closed off, police are everywhere outside and
Secret Service everywhere inside. You have to arrive an hour ahead of time.
Dogs have to sniff you before you can sit in the audience. This has the effect
of raising the ante on Gore, wherever he goes--you feel that for all this
trouble you should get a big payoff.
But on this particular day, after the audience had been assembled
and had sat waiting for a good while in the auditorium, Gore merely ambled
onstage from the wings, accompanied by Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of
Goldman, Sachs and former Secretary of the Treasury, who is now with Citigroup,
and who also ambled. The Democratic Party had made peace with Wall Street.
Gore’s new campaign theme was Prosperity and Progress. There was a logo behind
the lectern with those words printed repeatedly across a map of the United
States. Gore sat in a chair, motionless as a wax figure, while Rubin introduced
him, stressing the role Gore had played in a project that his father had not
considered very worthy during his officeholding days: eliminating the federal
deficit.
I had been watching Gore speak all spring. He has held elective office continuously for twenty-four years, so he has an enormous amount of experience at this. Still, it obviously doesn’t come naturally to him. He is poised, he has a rich, booming voice, but he doesn’t often “inhabit the role,” in the acting sense; instead, every move seems calculated and practiced. I kept thinking of that early scene in “Terminator 2,” when Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg, walks into a biker bar, and a digital readout flashes across the inside of his eyelids, giving height, weight, and build of each person he sees. Similarly, you can see Gore read a situation, pause while the script flashes, formulate his response--and then react. He has an odd quality of taking in what he’s seeing with an almost digitalized exactitude (that’s why, in private, he’s supposed to be a gifted mimic), while appearing to be oblivious. Rubin, at one point in his introduction, glanced fondly over at Gore.