by James Mann
He meanwhile kept a hand in the developments of his father’s administration, even from 1,200 miles away. He was assigned his own Secret Service detail and spent Christmases at Camp David along with the rest of the Bush family. Soon after the 1988 election, he headed a small internal group called the Scrub Team, which vetted appointees to the new administration—once again playing the role of loyalty enforcer. Three years into George H. W. Bush’s administration, when Republicans began to demand the ouster of John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, it was George W. who assumed the role of hatchet man. He flew to Washington, asked to meet Sununu, and informed him he was becoming a burden. Sununu delivered a letter of resignation to the president six days later.
Although he was regarded as the most volatile and unpredictable of the Bush children, George W. was also the one whom his parents most frequently brought into high-level politics and diplomacy. When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington in the spring of 1992, for example, the exclusive White House dinner for him included just eight people: the president and first lady, Gorbachev and his wife, Secretary of State James Baker and his wife, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft—and George W. Bush.
When his father ran for reelection that year, George W. again played an influential role in the campaign. Once again, he courted the Christian Right as an important part of the Republican coalition. Lee Atwater had died of brain cancer in 1991, and without him the Bush reelection campaign lacked a senior strategist. The younger Bush tried to offer advice, at one point suggesting that his father dump Vice President Dan Quayle and instead name Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as his running mate. George H. W. Bush wasn’t willing to do this, but the idea of putting Cheney on the ticket was one to which George W. would return eight years later.
With an economy that seemed to be floundering, his father lost the 1992 election to Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. That defeat marked the abrupt end of George H. W. Bush’s long political career. For more than a quarter century, George W. had helped with his father’s campaigns and had been defined, over and over again, as George H. W. Bush’s son. Now, at age forty-six, George W. could not play that role any more. “Watching a good man lose made 1992 one of the worst years of my life,” he wrote many years later.
He learned some lessons from his father’s defeat. George H. W. Bush had never managed to win over the right wing of the party, particularly the evangelicals. He had been viewed as an elitist, out of touch with ordinary people, more an East Coast blue blood than a Texan. He had alienated foreign-policy hawks by failing to press for the breakup of the Soviet Union; as a result, quite a few neoconservatives supported Clinton in 1992, and a few even went to work for him. Worst of all, George H. W. Bush had raised taxes, after explicitly pledging not to do so. His son took note of these political mistakes and would eventually seek to rectify all of them.
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It is commonly assumed that George W. Bush started to contemplate a career in politics only after his father’s defeat. The record shows otherwise. It is more accurate to say that George W. kept his own long-held plans to run for office in check until his father had left the national stage. The results of the 1992 election, crushing though they were for the Bush family, also cleared the way for George W. to launch his own political career.
His business career had gone nowhere, and baseball was little more than a hobby. Politics was the field he knew best, the one he enjoyed most, and the one in which he had acquired the most experience. Even during the early days, when he was drinking and was struggling in business, he had held top-level jobs in political campaigns. He had run once for Congress on his own and had helped manage his father’s campaigns, twice for vice president and twice for the presidency. He had been schooled directly by Atwater in the high and low arts of American politics.
There was no particular issue or ideology driving him to political life, but then, from his own viewpoint, there hadn’t been for his father, either, who began his career as a Goldwater conservative before turning into a moderate Republican. George W. thought he could be at least as good at winning elections as his father if not better. His father had risen to high office mostly through a series of appointments and at election time often found himself out of tune with the Republican grassroots. George W. Bush’s identity as a tough-talking Texan, his ties with evangelical groups and other groups that had mistrusted his father—and still, on the other hand, the Bush family name—all gave him the confidence that if he ran, he would do well.
In early 1989, soon after his father’s inauguration, George W. had begun to flirt with the idea of running for governor of Texas the following year. He spent several months traveling through the state, talking to local Republican leaders and donors and generating a wave of news stories and magazine profiles about his possible candidacy.
Among those opposing the idea was his mother. Barbara Bush worried that if the two George Bushes, father and son, held office at the same time, then any unpopular actions by either one of them could drag down the other one. At one point, to her son’s chagrin, she said publicly that she thought he should devote his energy to the baseball team he had just acquired. “When you make a major commitment like that, I think maybe you won’t be running for governor,” she told reporters.
Finally, in August 1989, George W. announced that he had decided not to run, and for the next several years he occupied himself with the Texas Rangers. Bush himself later reflected that it was in these baseball years that he learned how to become more comfortable as a public speaker. “I also gained valuable experience handling tough questions from journalists, in this case mostly about our shaky pitching rotation,” he recalled.
His ownership stake in the Rangers made him a wealthy man for the first time in his life. With the construction of a new ballpark in Arlington and the growing popularity of the Rangers, Bush’s initial investment of $606,000 increased in value: by the time he sold his shares in the team in the late 1990s, they were worth $14.9 million.
By 1992, his father’s final year in the White House, George W. seemed almost desperate to get started in his own political career and to overcome, finally, nicknames like Junior that identified him as his father’s child. “I’m his kid, but I’m also older than his vice president,” George W., then forty-five years old, admonished one reporter.
Within months after his father’s defeat, he began preparing to run for governor of Texas once again, this time in earnest. The Democratic governor, Ann Richards, was up for reelection in 1994. Richards was an old adversary of the Bush family: in a speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention, she had delivered the famous quip that George H. W. Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” She was flamboyant, acid-tongued, and by all appearances extremely popular in Texas.
Nevertheless, George W. decided to try to unseat her. He ran his first statewide campaign hand in hand with his old friend Karl Rove, who had become a notable political consultant in Texas. Both men had studied the campaign techniques of Lee Atwater. Bush also hired a former Texas television reporter, Karen Hughes, to serve as his communications director, and she quickly became part of the Bush inner circle.
It was in Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial race that he and Rove came up with their disciplined strategy: Bush should keep his temper in check, concentrate on a few broad themes, avoid getting sidetracked, and hold relentlessly to the same messages and response lines throughout the long campaign. Years later, Richards recalled with a mix of frustration and admiration how difficult it had been to engage Bush: “I think that the talent that George Bush has—and I say this with real respect—is that rather than tell you the intricacies of what he knows or what he intends to do, he is very good at saying things that are rather all-encompassing. You know, if you said to George, ‘What time is it?’ he would say, ‘We must teach our children to read.’”
Education was one of the issues Bush chose to emphasize in the campaign. Richards had endorsed the idea of transferring
some money from wealthier school districts to poorer districts. That gave Bush a chance to argue that although she was a witty, engaging personality, her actual policies were out of touch with conservative, middle-class Texans. Bush promised repeatedly to transfer more control over public schools to local districts. He also pledged to improve the criminal justice system, renew efforts to alleviate poverty, overhaul welfare, and institute tort reform.
Bush felt a pressing need to establish his own political identity, separate from that of his father. He had never held public office, and memories of George H. W. Bush’s White House years were fresh. “All that I ask is that for once, you guys stop seeing me as the son of George Bush,” he told an interviewer in 1994. “This campaign is about me, no one else.”
This problem was further compounded by the fact that his brother Jeb was running that year for governor of Florida, so that there were, inevitably, national news stories juxtaposing the two Bush sons and their political ambitions. George W. repeatedly sought to downplay the family connection. His father did not appear beside him during the campaign, and George W. did not mention his father in campaign appearances.
Richards portrayed Bush as a lightweight who was inexperienced in government. She dubbed him Prince George or George the Younger. During her campaign, she pointed to his lack of success in business, described the financial help he got from family and friends, criticized the use of public funds to build a new ballpark for the Rangers, and brought up the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of his sale of Harken stock.
She tried to provoke Bush and to rattle him. On the night of the only television debate of the campaign, Richards and Bush accidentally met on a hotel elevator. She looked at him and said, “This one’s going to be tough on you, boy.” Yet Bush maintained his equipoise, both in the debate and throughout the extended campaign, leaving it to Rove and other aides to attack Richards. They pointed to the campaign contributions Richards was receiving from Hollywood and from national liberal organizations as proof that she was somehow less Texan than Bush.
Meanwhile, Bush worked hard to court the conservatives and the evangelicals whose lack of support had so badly damaged his father in 1992. He invited radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh to be his guest at the Texas Rangers game marking Nolan Ryan’s retirement. The month before Election Day, the Houston Post reported that Bush, in an interview, said he believed that “heaven is only open to those who accept Jesus Christ.”
During the final weeks of the campaign, Ross Perot, the Texas businessman whose independent presidential campaign in 1992 had cost George H. W. Bush the election, endorsed Richards: one Bush family nemesis lining up behind another. It didn’t matter. Although Richards had originally been the favorite, Bush captured 53 percent of the electorate, a margin of more than 300,000 votes.
The nationwide results that November included a second development of profound consequence for George W.: in Florida, his brother Jeb was defeated. That meant that George W. suddenly became the leading political figure in the Bush family, the one who was gaining the experience necessary to run for president. Even when Jeb Bush won in his second race for governor in 1998, he was not on an equal footing with his older brother.
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As governor of Texas, Bush tried out some of the same ideas, arguments, and catchphrases he would later use as president. It was in Texas that Bush first called himself a “compassionate conservative,” a slogan his father’s political advisers had come up with during the 1988 presidential campaign. It was during his years as governor that Bush first proposed “faith-based” initiatives, in which governments could turn to religious organizations to provide social services. It was in Texas that Bush first emphasized the importance of requiring elementary-school students to pass basic standardized tests for reading and other basic skills. Even some of the one-liners Bush used as president were taken directly from his time as governor. “I’ve got a lot of capital to spend, and I’m going to spend every dime of it,” he once observed in Texas, with virtually the same words he would use after winning reelection as president in 2004.
Nevertheless, Bush’s performance as governor stands out in hindsight because of the contrast with his more confrontational approach and his more sweeping and ambitious policies as president. In Texas, he often sought to avoid conflict and to portray himself as a moderate Republican. He formed close relationships with the Democratic leaders of the Texas legislature. He often proved willing to compromise to get his programs enacted.
During his first year in office, Bush won approval for greater control for local school districts. He also succeeded in implementing changes to Texas’s juvenile justice system, tort laws, and welfare requirements, each of which he had cited as priorities during the 1994 campaign. Bush formed an unusually tight bond with Bob Bullock, the Democratic lieutenant governor, a feisty old-style politician and the state’s most powerful figure. (In Texas, the lieutenant governor is elected separately from the governor and has enormous power over the Texas Senate, serving as its president and determining its agenda.) Bush courted Bullock so assiduously that Bullock later crossed party lines to endorse Bush for president.
On social issues, Governor Bush occasionally proved to be surprisingly liberal. In 1996, a federal appeals court struck down as unconstitutional an affirmative-action program in which the University of Texas had set aside specific places in its law school for members of minority groups. In response, Bush signed a law that required public colleges and universities in Texas to admit any student who graduated in the top 10 percent of his or her high school class. That measure, widely praised by civil rights leaders, ensured that the best black and Hispanic students from largely segregated schools could gain admission to the state university system, even if their standardized test scores were lower than those of whites elsewhere. “We want all our students in Texas to have a fair shot at achieving their dreams,” said Bush in signing the bill.
He refused to join in the growing backlash within the Republican Party against immigration. In California, Governor Pete Wilson strongly endorsed a ballot measure that denied state benefits to illegal aliens, but Bush refused to support Wilson’s approach. Indeed, in his campaigns for governor and as president, Bush consistently won greater percentages of Latino votes than other Republican candidates.
As governor of Texas, Bush was not a radical tax cutter in the way that he later became as president. When Bush proposed cutting property taxes, he sought to offset some of the losses to the state treasury by increasing sales and business taxes. In the process, he aroused the ire of antitax conservatives, who said he had violated a promise not to raise taxes. The Texas legislature eventually rejected his proposals to change the tax laws.
On crime and the death penalty, he remained staunchly conservative. Texas executes more death-row inmates than any other state, and in the Bush years the frequency increased. There were 152 executions during Bush’s six years in office, each one approved by the governor. He granted clemency only once. At one point, Christian groups pleaded with Bush to block the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer who had converted to Christianity while in prison. Bush turned down their appeals. On another occasion, a Canadian citizen convicted of murder was given a death sentence. After Canadian officials protested, Bush told reporters, “If you’re Canadian and you come to our state, don’t murder anybody.”
Politically, the details of Bush’s performance as governor did not matter all that much. His name was Bush and he was the Republican governor of the nation’s second-largest state; those facts alone made him a likely presidential contender. Later, after he won the Republican presidential nomination, a reporter asked his father to explain George W.’s rapid ascent. The former president replied that once his son became governor of Texas, “It’s a six-inch putt.”
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The planning for a presidential campaign started early, after Bush had been governor for little more than a year. In the early spring of 1996, soon after
Bob Dole wrapped up the Republican nomination, Rove began talking to Bush about running in 2000 and discovered that Bush himself had already begun to think about it. Both of them calculated that Dole would lose, and that the Republicans would turn to a younger candidate four years later. Indeed, Bush thought that one important factor in his father’s loss to Bill Clinton had been the generational difference between them: America’s baby-boom generation was beginning to dominate American politics and was turning toward leaders of its own.
At the 1996 Republican National Convention, Rove worked on Bush’s behalf, arranging interviews for reporters who wanted to write profiles of him and telling Republican delegates that the governor of Texas was “our Clinton.” After Dole lost the election, reporters and handicappers quickly put Bush on their short lists of potential Republican candidates for 2000. The other contenders were, as a group, not formidable; each seemed to have defects. Colin Powell had no strong desire to run and was too liberal for the party’s base. Jack Kemp was conservative but had never been elected to anything beyond a House seat. Dan Quayle could never overcome his image as lacking in gravitas.
Over the following two years Rove, by his own account, “was constantly plotting, planning and scheming” on Bush’s behalf. Bush, meanwhile, devoted much of his energy to winning reelection as governor of Texas. He and Rove began lining up a nationwide network of donors, many of whom had previously supported George H. W. Bush’s campaigns. In 1998 the Bush-Rove team put special emphasis on winning Hispanic support in places like El Paso that had historically supported Democratic candidates. The goal, in both cases, was not just to win reelection in Texas but also to demonstrate to Republicans elsewhere that Bush would be a strong national candidate.
