The W. Nobody Knows
What he’s like in real life.
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He reads at night, another habit (current bedside books, according to former librarian Laura: The Color of Night, the latest thriller by David L. Lindsey; Hadrian’s Walls, a novel by Robert Draper; and John C. Waugh’s Reelecting Lincoln). He also likes to surf the Internet (it’s where he reads the Houston Chronicle), but his online preference runs to e-mail, a communication skill he honed when one of the twins attended school in Rome this past fall. One thing he doesn’t spend much time doing is watching TV news. “We quit watching in the ’92 campaign,” says Laura, “and we got out of the habit. He’d rather watch baseball anyway.”
Though no longer associated with the Rangers, Bush remains a devoted fan; he owns an electronic device that gives him up-to-the-minute scores, refers to baseball in his speeches, and converses about the game with anyone who will listen. In 1995, at his annual Christmas party for the media, he asked a few of us what team we first followed when we were kids. I mentioned the Houston Buffaloes of the Texas League. “Pidge Browne,” he said, correctly pronouncing the last name of the long-ago first baseman with two syllables. “I was there when he got his first big-league hit.”
All of this seems rather normal—or perhaps, for a man who is seeking the presidency, abnormal, as George W. Bush has little of the obsession with politics that you might expect. The Bushes’ closest friends are nonpolitical and often date from the time when he was a young oilman in Midland or, in Laura’s case, growing up there. For those who would wish for clues to the state of the Bushes’ marriage, certainly a ripe subject for president-watchers these days, let it be noted that he is the kind of husband who enjoys spending social evenings with Laura and several of her old friends who now live in Austin. Social conversation with longtime pals runs to family, mutual friends, and Midland, not politics—even with Don Evans, another Midlander, whom Bush appointed chairman of the UT Board of Regents in 1995. Last June, the Bushes threw a party on the lawn of the Governor’s Mansion for Midland friends that Laura called “the thirty-third and one third reunion of Midland Lee and Midland High.” Among Texas politicians, Bush is more in the mold of former lieutenant governor Bill Hobby, who came to politics late and always maintained a life apart from it, than in the mold of Lyndon Johnson, for whom politics was all-consuming and had been all his life.
HOW DOES THIS PERSONALITY PLAY OUT? His impatience shows itself in meetings, which he hates (“They bore me”), and briefings, which he tolerates. “He likes to get to the heart of the matter, the things that aren’t in the briefing book,” says Karen Hughes. He is likely to interrupt a discussion that he thinks is going nowhere and ask a big-picture question. Earlier this year former Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was advising him on national security—the number of troops, morale, benefits, and so on—when Bush interrupted: “Wait, let me ask something. What is the role of America’s defense today?” Answered Wolfowitz: “I wish more people would ask that kind of question when discussing details of military budgets.”
But his focus on the big picture to the exclusion of the little one has a downside. Bush is not a policy wonk. He prefers ideas to plans; his concept of a leader is someone who sets the agenda with a few broad policy statements and delegates the specifics to the Legislature—an approach that has worked well as long as his proposals already had strong support (as was the case in 1995) and not so well when he alone was pulling the wagon (as has been the case with his efforts in 1997 and 1999 to reduce school property taxes). Not being a detail man, he has never fully appreciated that the fate of legislation often depends not on the philosophy behind it but on the tiny details that can have enormous ripple effects. Even an issue as simple as his proposal to lock up all juveniles arrested for illegal possession of firearms caused him an embarrassing temporary setback this year when it proved to be unworkable in rural areas that have no juvenile detention centers.
His notion of how to be a chief executive has been heavily influenced by watching his father’s presidency fall apart. President Bush reneged on a campaign promise (“Read my lips: No new taxes”); Governor Bush fights on for the property-tax relief he proposed, despite legislative urging that he accept an alternative that would enable him to declare victory and head for New Hampshire. President Bush had a 91 percent approval rating but did not use his political capital and watched it dwindle; Governor Bush spends his capital by taking on the biggest issues he can find—education reform in 1995, tax reform in 1997, and requiring all students to read at their grade level in 1999. President Bush pledged to be the education president and the environmental president; Governor Bush has said that “to be for everything is to be for nothing.” Just because he isn’t involved in an issue, though, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a position, as a group of university chancellors found out this spring when they went to see him to ask for $1 billion more in spending for higher education. Would you take $500 million? Bush asked. Okay, they said. Just kidding, said Bush, but I cut your budget 50 percent in thirty seconds. Come back when you can justify what you’re asking for.
He is formidable in these informal settings. Bush speaks louder with body language than any politician I have ever seen. He slouches in a chair to convey utter confidence. He bobs his head when he talks as if to indicate agreement with his own words. He snaps his fingers to effect a transition in a conversation. And he talks with his eyes. They widen to show sincerity, light up as a prelude to a joke, narrow to show disapproval, and look upward to suggest irony—usually to the accompaniment of a one-syllable guttural chuckle, a “heh” straight out of Beavis and Butt-head.
This personality doesn’t come across on television, a medium on which he can seem stiff and formal. But with his fellow politicians and his own staff, he is adroit at creating intimacy. He tags them with nicknames: Bob Bullock was, inspiredly, Bully, and Karen Hughes is Prophet, a play on her maiden name, Parfitt. And he makes great use of physical contact. On a visit to the office of a House committee chairman, a Democrat who has control of several bills that are crucial to the governor’s legislative program, Bush began by kissing both of his cheeks, as if they were a couple of Mafia dons about to seal a secret pact. On a visit to the House floor, he lobbied a Republican legislator with an independent streak by locking an arm around his neck, drawing him close, telling him “You need to be with me,” then pressing his victim’s cheeks together until his mouth formed an “O.” The legislator told me later, “He was like a teacher telling me, ‘I know what you were doing while I went to the restroom.’” This personal style may not have gotten him all of the legislation that he wants, but it has achieved something equally valuable: the goodwill of just about everybody in the Capitol, Democrats included.
But that all comes to an end sometime this summer. For the first time in more than four years, he will have to deal with people who do not wish him well—his rivals for the Republican nomination, Democrats who want to inflict wounds on the front-runner, a cynical media corps, and the inevitable rumormongers. In the peculiar calculus of presidential politics, how he reacts to criticism will be more crucial than the substance of the criticism, and Bush will have to curb his natural tendency, which is to vent his anger and then forget about it. So far so good: “I’ve already been asked by a reporter at a press conference, ‘Is it true you wrestled naked in a coffin at Skull and Bones [at Yale]?’” he says. “I tried to give him a withering stare. I’m not going to play their game. I’ve made mistakes, but I’m going to bring honor, integrity, and dignity to the office.” And, he might have added, humor. If it were possible to banter one’s way to the presidency, he would be a shoo-in. Instead, George W. Bush will have to prove himself all over again.
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