The Race Is On
Lightweight? Debate? Running Mate? Answers to These and Other Questions about George W. Bush as the Starting Gun Finally Sounds On The 2000 Campaign.
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The consequence is that Bush's only opponent in the Substance Primary is himself. In the GOP field his policy pronouncements alone are newsworthy. But—here's that lightweight issue again—the difficulty for Bush is to demonstrate that his ideas are his own rather than a recitation of somebody else's words about somebody else's ideas. How does he do this? One way is to articulate them fluently under the pressure of a debate—a skill, however, that he has never been able to master (and one, it might be added, that has little to do with the job of president).
In other words, the Substance Primary has turned into the Style Primary. As the Associated Press put it in a second-day story about the December 6 debate in Arizona, "[H]is scripted and sometimes vague answers have failed to silence questions about his political heft and readiness to lead the country"—or, if you prefer the New York Times' version, the problem was Bush's "intellectual heft and poise." Not that credentials necessarily win the media's respect, as Bush reminded me on the trip to New Hampshire: "They complained that George Herbert Walker Bush was all résumé," he said. "It's a game."
But the game is getting rough. In the Arizona debate Orrin Hatch said directly to Bush that instead of running for president, he should set his sights on being vice president: "You should have eight years with me," Hatch said, "and, boy, you'll make a heck of a president after eight years." McCain chimed in the next day that Hatch's line "was one that we all wanted to use, but he used it first."
The lightweight question even found its way into the Reagan Library when Bush gave his foreign policy address there a week before Thanksgiving. The pop quiz on foreign leaders was still fresh news, and George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, went out of his way in his introduction to defend Bush's intellect, describing him as somebody who likes being around people who like ideas. That sounded pretty good, unless you compared it to Shultz's earlier description of Ronald Reagan: "a person of ideas."
On January 24 the talk stops and the voting starts. That is the date of the Iowa caucuses, and unless Bush proposes a ban on growing corn, he will defeat Forbes, effectively knocking him out of the race. McCain isn't making much of an effort in Iowa. All of his chips are on the February 1 New Hampshire primary. Polls matching Bush against McCain in the Granite State are statistically even, but much of McCain's strength lies with independent voters, who can vote in the primary of their choice. Before McCain can defeat Bush, he must beat Bill Bradley, who is trying to lure those same independents to the Democratic side.
If McCain loses New Hampshire, it's over. Even if he wins, it is hard to invent a scenario that ends with him as the nominee. He has a definite appeal to mavericks, but such voters are not the foundation on which political parties are built. He lacks the resources or the organization to tackle Bush in state after state, and because the primary season is front-loaded this year (California and New York vote on March 7), he doesn't have the time either. Bush is strong everywhere; McCain is strong nowhere outside New Hampshire—not even in his home state of Arizona, where the governor has endorsed Bush, and certainly not in New York, where, the New York Observer has reported, he is unable to get on the ballot in many congressional districts, thanks to the efforts of Governor George Pataki, a Bush ally. If McCain can stay alive in New Hampshire, his next battleground is South Carolina on February 18. The former POW is counting on the large veterans' vote there, but Bush has a solid lead. Unless Bush gets complacent or commits a fatal blunder—something akin to Edmund Muskie's weeping in 1972—what can McCain do? Hope for vice president?
Not likely. McCain is his own man, which is the last thing any aspiring president wants his running mate to be (especially Bush, who values loyalty above all other qualities), and this independent streak causes him not to get on well with many Republicans in the Senate, a body he would preside over as vice president. Then who? The current GOP field is so weak that not only is it hard to envision any of Bush's rivals as president but it's equally hard to envision any of them as vice president. Among the dropouts, Lamar Alexander, John Kasich, and Elizabeth Dole will get a look. But Alexander has run for president twice without inspiring much interest; Kasich, an Ohio congressman, is pretty far down in the pecking order despite his chairmanship of the budget committee; and Dole has never held elected office and fizzled out when she tried to start at the top. Even worse, as one member of the Bush camp said to me last fall, you get Bob Dole telling her what to do and Bob Dole telling Bush what to do.
The ideal choice would be a big-state governor who is pro-life, close to Bush, and totally loyal—but brother Jeb in Florida will have to wait for another day. The swing area in the election is likely to be the Rust Belt, and several governors from the Midwest and Northeast are strong contenders, including John Engler of Michigan, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, and Pataki of New York. But Engler doesn't come across well on TV, Ridge is pro-choice, and so, to a lesser degree, is Pataki. In a year when Pat Buchanan could be the nominee of the Reform Party, Bush may not take the risk of picking a vice president who could cause pro-life activists to bolt the GOP. The trouble with picking a vice president is that whoever you settle on has some major flaw, or he'd be picking his vice president.
In the race for the Republican nomination, all Bush has had to do is sit on his lead, avoid the big gaffe, and run out the clock. The general election rates to be a far more difficult campaign. Bush would be carrying the weight of the unpopular Republican Congress, and polls show that the Democrats enjoy public support on such issues as HMO reform, gun control, and saving medicare and social security.
The conventional wisdom is that Bill Bradley would be the toughest opponent for Bush. Al Gore is inextricably tied to Bill Clinton; Bradley takes the Clinton issue off the table. Gore is a Washington insider; Bradley thumbed his nose at Washington, gave up his Senate seat, and left town. Gore hired Naomi Wolf to get him in touch with his alpha male side; Bradley is an ex-jock. Gore's base is Tennessee; Bradley's is New York and New Jersey, which are rich in electoral votes. But the Bush camp thinks that Bradley is too liberal and too elitist to appeal to the mass of voters. They also envision Clinton putting forth much more effort on behalf of Gore than he would for Bradley. Not only is the president the Democrats' best fundraiser, but he also can get federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on Texas, causing Bush embarrassment.
To win the presidency, Bush is going to have to raise the level of his game, and that brings us right back to the lightweight question. Can he do it? No one who watched Bush dominate the agenda in Texas during his years as governor has any doubts about his political heft. He is, to be sure, more intuitive than intellectual, but intuition is a more valuable political asset than intellectualism. In the end the lightweight issue is irritating but seldom devastating. Bush should know. Ann Richards tried it against him in 1994—and if it had worked, he wouldn't be here.
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