Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
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Bush practiced his swing and teed off, with a long drive that veered a bit too far to the right, then he approached the press gaggle to answer questions. The presidency has aged him tremendously; his hair has turned a patrician silver, and his forehead is deeply lined, so much so that the hard contours of his father's face are becoming his own. Standing before the TV cameras, Bush answered questions with a blunt efficiency. He expressed his optimism about the flagging economy, artfully dodged a question about Americans' preparedness for casualties in a war with Iraq, and held forth on Saddam Hussein: "The consultation process is a positive part of really allowing people to fully understand our deep concerns about this man, his regime, and his desires to have weapons of mass destruction. Last question—and then I've got to go chip and putt for a birdie." He departed down the fairway, and Secret Service agents herded us back to the clubhouse, where we were required to stay, under their watch, for the duration of the round, until Bush reached the eighteenth hole two and a half hours later. After taking six strokes on the par-four hole, he conceded it to former state senator David Sibley. Bush declined to tell us his score. "I had a lot of fun," he said cheerfully. "It's good to be back here with my friends in Texas." He shook hands with onlookers outside the clubhouse, hopped in the waiting motorcade, and then he was gone.
Whenever the president steps into his black Suburban, the motorcade starts to move, and it will roll along at a rapid clip whether reporters are in their vehicles yet or not. We were standing about thirty feet away when it took off. And so we began a mad dash across the manicured grass to our already-moving van, into which we leaped and collapsed, panting, with elbows and camera lenses stuck every which way. ("I once got left behind at the Great Wall of China," CNN cameraman Barry Schlegel later told me.) But for all the oddity of the situation, and for all the staginess and canned sincerity that makes it easy to be cynical about modern politics, watching the expressions of people standing by the side of the road when the presidential motorcade returned to Crawford was very moving. Here, at last, was a genuine political moment. Waving families stood on their porches, cheering. Kids ran alongside the motorcade with tiny American flags. Farmers stood in their pastures and took off their hats, nodding in deference. An older woman who was bent over her flower bed stood up, startled, and beamed. Along Main Street, people gaped and smiled and stared in wonder. After all, somewhere in that procession of black cars that careened past them, somewhere behind those dark tinted windows, was the president of the United States.
THE SECOND MOST FAMOUS POLITICIAN in town is Robert Campbell—an unapologetic Democrat and the mayor of Crawford. ("It's just so embarrassing," one local Republican whispered.) When Campbell is not checking the town's water meters or worrying about its leaky sewers, he is the minister of the Perry Chapel United Methodist Church, a modest white clapboard building that sits at the heart of Crawford's tiny black community, east of the railroad tracks. Campbell is a tall, sinewy man of sixty who wears bifocals and a perpetually worried expression, which will give way without warning to an easy, boisterous laugh. I first met him one Sunday when I went to Perry Chapel to see him preach. Inside the sanctuary, decorated with a simple cross of two unvarnished cedar branches, Campbell addressed the congregation, mostly older women in wide-brimmed hats and vivid silk dresses. When a nearby train sounded its horn, he raised his voice above it, preaching from the Book of Isaiah and its lesson of beating swords into plowshares. Campbell is a contained, unassuming man until he is behind the pulpit, and then his voice thunders with conviction. Gripping the lectern that Sunday morning, he urged his parishioners: "Let's pray that God will lean on our world leaders so that they will give us what we want: Peace."
Mayor Campbell says he is "neutral" about having the president for a neighbor, but his lukewarm embrace of Bush has divided the town as much as the changes taking place all around. "My job is to look out for what's best for Crawford," he explained. "It's not about party affiliations. This town has limited manpower and limited resources, and the president's presence here has put an enormous strain on us." As proof, the mayor points to the demands on the town's two-man police force, the wear and tear on its roads, and inflated property taxes, which have soared in the past two years along with property values. Tourist dollars, Campbell said, have been poor remuneration; sales tax revenue makes up just 7 percent of the town's annual budget. What the mayor does not articulate, but which is at times evident, is his more personal ambivalence about the president. Campbell grew up in the projects of North Philadelphia, and the subjects of hunger and poverty are recurrent themes in his sermons. "People who get out of the projects always remember where they came from," he said. So what does he think of a president whose life experience is so fundamentally different from his own? Out of political necessity, the mayor is discreet. When pressed, he said, "We see the world differently. The children of politicians won't be the ones fighting a war in Iraq."
Mayor Campbell's job does not hinge on heady geopolitical conflicts but on crises as varied as missing manhole covers and stray dogs. The mayor had to interrupt our first conversation when a water main sprang a leak; only he knew exactly where the pipe ran beneath the asphalt—because he had long ago laid it himself. Few politicians know their territory as intimately as Campbell, whose nuts-and-bolts knowledge of the town has been gained the hard way. After retiring from the Air Force in 1982 and marrying a local woman, he took the only job offer he got: to be the Crawford maintenance man. For three years he patched the town's streets, fixed its water and sewer lines, cut its grass, and ran a bulldozer to its dump. When he went to college on the GI Bill and then to graduate school (he earned bachelor's degrees in business administration and social work at Baylor University and a master's in divinity at Southern Methodist University), he worked part-time as the town mailman, learning the names of future constituents along his route. He served for nine years on the city council and became mayor in 1999, when he won accolades getting the town on sound economic footing. But when George W. Bush was elected president, the mayor's constituency split along political lines. Two years ago Campbell's run for mayor was uncontested, but this May he barely prevailed against a Republican by a margin of six votes.
From his vantage point at city hall, on Main Street, Mayor Campbell can do little but watch as the topography of his town becomes increasingly unfamiliar. Across the street, the American Legion Hall and the old feedstore have been demolished to make room for a bank—built in anticipation of Crawford, with its top-notch schools and new cachet as home of the president, soon becoming a bedroom community of Waco. North of town, in the brand-new River Oaks subdivision, where homes cost up to $1 million, emerald green lawns meet the prairie grass. On Main Street, a steady trickle of tourists peers in the windows of the new gift shops stocked with souvenirs: "This Is Bush Country" refrigerator magnets, "A Merry Christmas From Crawford, Y'all" tree ornaments, rhinestone "Dubya" pins, White House snow globes, "Go Get 'em, George" coasters, and "Western White House" koozies, to name a few. One block south on Main Street, inside the Coffee Station, tourists pose for pictures next to a life-size President Bush cardboard cutout and scrawl greetings in the cafe's guest book. (A recent sample: "Love you, W!" "God bless our prez," "Great to be in Bush country," and most pointedly, "Where's George?") "We need billboards on I-35 directing people to Crawford," says Valerie Duty, a Waco resident who sells souvenirs at Crawford Country Style. "We can be a destination point, like Fredericksburg."
Mayor Campbell takes off his glasses and wearily rubs his eyes when I ask him about his critics, who accuse him of failing to capitalize on the town's newfound fame. "Let me explain," Campbell said. "I am not trying to be isolationist. I've asked that the Bush Presidential Library be built at Baylor. That would be beneficial to us in the long-term. But we also need to plan in case President Bush sells the ranch. He has no roots here. And what then?" He worries that Crawford will be left in the lurch after the Bush presidency is over. "We need a grocery store, not a ninth souvenir shop," he said. But two of Campbell's parishioners, the Hemphill sisters, take a more philosophical view. Margie, 81, and Vickie, 82, have seen Crawford through its booms and busts, all while cleaning white people's houses and caring for their sick on the other side of the tracks. I talked to them one day after church in Margie's living room, where the sisters sat on a faded yellow flower-print sofa that had belonged to B. F. Engelbrecht, Margie's former employer and the man who sold his ranch to Bush in 1999. As governor, Bush slept on the sofa once when he visited the ranch, and the Engelbrechts later gave it to Margie as a keepsake. She smoothed it with her hand as we talked about the ways Crawford was changing. "We live next to the railroad tracks, and we've gotten used to the trains passing by," Margie said with a shrug. "We'll get used to this too."
Margie had only one complaint about the president, which she waited to mention until I had stood up to leave. It was a fact that Mayor Campbell had no doubt dwelled on, privately. "Mr. Bush has gone to other churches in town. Why hasn't he come to the mayor's church?" she asked. Then she patted the worn couch, as if she had said too much. "He's always welcome to come pray with us."
