The Man Who Isn't There
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I wasn't the only one wondering what had happened to the George W. Bush I thought I knew; Republicans around the Texas Capitol were asking the same thing. His advisers' penchant for keeping him on message and avoiding any mistakes submerged his personality. But I had other concerns. How could the guy who the right wing in Texas had blocked from being the leader of the state's delegation to the 1996 Republican National Convention have gone to Bob Jones University and embraced the very worst elements of the right wing, people who had openly loathed his father? Karen Hughes, his communications director, told me at the time that after their decisive defeat in New Hampshire, they needed an enthusiastic crowd in South Carolina, and where else could they be sure of finding one? I wonder if Bush understood the negative symbolic importance of that appearance to his core constituency in the political center. In retrospect, this was a pivotal moment for him in two ways: It proved that winning mattered to him after all, and it threw him into the clutches of the right. And, given the militancy of that wing of the Republican party and Bush's own belief that he must avoid his father's mistake of alienating them, it meant that he would be locked permanently into reciprocating the embrace for the rest of his candidacy and at least the first term of his presidency.
Governor Bush had all but disappeared, to be replaced by a stiff and scripted fellow called Nominee Bush. I remember having lunch with Hughes in May, after the nomination was wrapped up, and she said, How do we get the country to see what he's really like? I suggested taking up Al Gore's challenge to debate every week; put him next to Gore and the country will like him better. But it wasn't in the script. In the fall, when Bush fell behind Gore, the campaign was still trying to avoid debates. I had more confidence in him than they did; I knew he was going to beat Gore head to head. He is the most competitive person you ever saw; every encounter is a joust. His zest for banter is well known by now, but the first time I experienced it was at a Texas A&M football game. It rained and rained and then it rained harder, and I had to give my raincoat to my two boys, so by halftime I was drenched. My hair was dripping water, my clothes were soaked through, and water squished out of my shoes as I traipsed up the stairs to the concession stands, a route that took me right by the VIP seats. A shout rang out: "Burka!" It was Bush, taking utter delight in my misery. "You're wet! Don't you know it's raining?"
I was quite surprised at the way Bush came to be viewed in the campaign. The Saturday Night Live caricature sums it up: a not-too-bright playboy. It would never have occurred to me (or anyone else who dealt with him at the Capitol) to think of Bush as dumb or lacking gravitas. He was both fluent and knowledgeable about the things a governor needed to know—his issues and Texas politics generally. His real forte was people and the political process. He had an unerring instinct for knowing how others really felt about him and how to win them over.
He had his shortcomings. Who doesn't? Chief among them was his narrow focus; if something wasn't on his radar screen, like higher education or the environment, forget about it. This quality is more of a problem for a president, who is expected to have a position on everything, than a governor. Bush picked out a few things he was interested in, pressed for his agenda, and seldom interfered with the rest. The attacks on Bush's record by the Democrats and the national media were true but not accurate. Yes, Texas leads the nation in air pollution, executions, and children without health insurance, but we were that way before Bush was governor, and we didn't change under all those Democratic governors, including Ann Richards.
BUSH WAS EXTREMELY LUCKY. RICHARDS faced budget and school-finance crises before him and Rick Perry faces budget and school-finance crises after him, but he faced neither. However, he has not been a lucky president; indeed, history dealt him the worst hand of any incoming president since Lincoln. He took office after an acrimonious election in which he lost the popular vote and was declared president rather than elected. The economy was sinking toward recession. Then, not quite eight months into his presidency, two jets brought down the World Trade Center, killed more than two thousand Americans, and sent the country into shock—at war with one enemy most people didn't know existed and, eventually, with another many didn't think it was necessary to fight.
Even before 9/11, I thought Bush was headed in the wrong direction. I worried that his $1.6 trillion tax cut was excessive, and in one aspect—the repeal of the inheritance tax—a huge mistake. Maybe the amount could be justified. The combination of tax cuts, deficits, and low interest rates is a textbook policy for stimulating the economy. Clinton chose to raise taxes on the wealthy to reduce the deficit, which is a different kind of textbook response: It frees up credit by taking the government out of the borrowing business. I don't know which textbook to believe, and I suspect that it is a matter of faith rather than science. At any rate, no one should be shocked that a Democrat would raise taxes on the wealthy or that a Republican would reduce them. But the repeal of inheritance taxes will do real harm to the country, which is why several Rockefellers and other zillionaires signed an ad in the New York Times opposing it. It would have made so much more sense to raise the ceiling enough to protect family businesses and parents who want to leave money for their grandkids to go to college. Not only will the repeal harm philanthropy by removing the tax-avoidance incentive for people to create foundations, but it will also remove the barrier to the creation of a permanent aristocracy in this country.
But the Bush policy that baffled me the most was, and is, his administration's unrelenting attack on the environment. I understand why he wanted to go easy on dirty refineries and power plants: In a recession, he wasn't going to eliminate a single job. But why did he want to spend his political capital on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Why identify himself as the oil president, an image that has undercut his Iraq policy—especially since the ANWR reserves are barely a drop in the bucket of our energy needs? Why did the administration suspend the last-minute Clinton rule reducing arsenic in drinking water? Who thought that was a good idea? In the end, the administration restored the Clinton reductions, but the PR damage was done.
Then there was his claim to be "a uniter, not a divider." Right out of the box, the White House got crosswise with Senator Jim Jeffords, a Vermont Republican, over policy and, some say, personal differences; he became an independent and the GOP lost its majority in the Senate. Bush's relationship with Senate majority leader Tom Daschle was frigid, in contrast to the one he had enjoyed with Democratic leaders Bob Bullock and Pete Laney back in Texas. (The administration's version is that Daschle said one thing in their private meetings and something totally different to the media; to Bush, that's tantamount to lying.) I don't want to be naive here: A new sheriff can't expect to ride into town and clean things up overnight. Partisanship is built into the structure of Congress. Still, Bush had talked, both in the campaign and in interviews with me, about wanting to change the political climate of Washington. It seems to me that he didn't try very hard. The House Republicans and their divider-not-a-uniter majority leader, Tom DeLay, were as much opposed to bipartisanship as the Senate Democrats. Unless DeLay could be detoxified, the political climate of Washington would remain the same. But Bush didn't have to take on DeLay to claim the political center. The Democrats let him have it by default by moving to the left, both inside the Beltway, where their House caucus chose Nancy Pelosi, of California, as their minority leader, and outside, where Howard Dean emerged as the front-runner for the party's 2004 presidential nomination.
