THE GAMESMAN:

The W. Nobody Knows: What he's like in real life. (Paul Burka, June 1999, Texas Monthly)

"Well, am I running?" George W. Bush demanded to know.

I happened to be sitting in my Suburban near the south door of the state capitol, discharging a passenger, just as the governor's silver-gray Lincoln Continental was doing the same. It was early February, well before he would announce the formation of a presidential exploratory committee, and a smidgen of suspense still lingered. I had waved at Bush as he went past, and he had swerved over to deliver the opening gambit in one of his favorite games: conversational one-upmanship. Having played it before, I knew I didn't have a chance.

"Sure," I said. "You'd be the wuss of all time if you didn't."

"But what about the rumors?" he shot back. Then, to my utter stupefaction, he proceeded to tick off everything the national press was investigating about his past: five or six of the most salacious things that could be said about anyone—including, in his own words, "I bought cocaine at my dad's inauguration"—plus intimate gossip about his family.

As he well knew, I had already heard all of it through the media grapevine. "You missed one," I said. "You crashed a jet while you were in the National Guard because you were drunk."

He spread his hands. "That's easy," he said. "Where's the plane?" Game over. He spun around and headed off.

When friends who have only a passing interest in politics ask me what Bush is really like, I tell them this story and others like it. On another occasion when his car was delivering him to the Capitol, he spied two well-heeled lobbyists walking down the steps among the throngs of tourists. He rolled down his window and shouted, "Show me the money!" They obediently flashed their wallets. One can only imagine what the common folk thought of this byplay.

A game can pop up anytime, anywhere. Recently Bush's chief fundraiser, Don Evans, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the nascent campaign hoped to raise between $10 million and $20 million by June. Karen Hughes, Bush's communications director, knew that the media would measure success by the higher figure, and at a press conference she tried to lower expectations: In 1995, she explained, Bob Dole had raised only $13.5 million in the same time frame. A TV reporter pressed the issue to Bush: If the goal isn't $20 million, what is it? Bush looked directly at Hughes, grinned, and said, "Nineteen and a half." "I felt," she told me, "like I was watching my son perform in the third-grade play."

These encounters reveal the man who is the odds-on favorite to become the next president of the United States as irreverent, unself-conscious, and intensely competitive. If you are his adversary, he delights in your discomfort—yet he expects you to recognize that it is something of an honor to be invited to play the game. His public and private personas are the same, something that is too seldom the case with politicians. If, as his detractors have charged, he is a middle-aged frat boy at heart, it should be remembered that the slogan of the French Revolution, the seminal event of the modern age, was "Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!"—and perhaps what is wrong with American politics right now is that in our battles over liberty and equality, we have neglected the commonality that is implicit in fraternity.

Better Fraternity than Equality anyway.

MORE:
Talking Politics: Senior executive editor Paul Burka on George W. Bush and this month's cover story, "The Man Who Isn't There." (Texas Monthly, February 2004)

texasmonthly.com: How do you think Bush will be remembered by historians?

PB: It's way too early to say what the final assessment will be, but I'll take a stab at a few things. 1) He will be seen as the third of a trio of presidents—Reagan, Clinton, Bush 43 (Hillary would make it a quartet if she's elected in '08)—who governed in polarizing times and were scorned by the opposition, to the point where their legitimacy was questioned: Reagan, because the Democrats regarded him as being a figurehead, an actor who was playing a role; Clinton, because the Republicans regarded him as morally unfit for the office; and Bush 43, because Democrats regarded him as not legitimately elected. Notice that Bush 41 fades from view, in part because he was a one-termer—the same fate that befell William Howard Taft, wedged between reformers Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The interesting question for historians will be whether the politicians themselves were polarizing or whether it was simply the times, with the generation that grew up in the sixties carrying its battles over cultural issues to the grave. 2) He will be seen as the president who was dealt the worst hand since Lincoln, with the possible exception of FDR: the disputed election, a serious recession, and the Al Qaeda attacks, all in his first year. 3) Many people see him as a very conservative president, but he will be harder to classify than we think. He greatly increased federal involvement in and support for public education; he enacted the biggest entitlement program since the Great Society in extending Medicare to cover prescription drugs, and now he proposes to help illegal immigrants. The old description of "compassionate conservative" may make it into the history books. Conservative columnist George Will recently suggested that Bush's moves mean the Republican party has at last made its peace with big government and the welfare state. On the other hand, Bush has put himself at risk, as far as history is concerned, with his anti-environmental policies (especially on global warming), his tax cut, and his doctrine of preemptive war. He has a lot of chips on the table, rolling the dice on the tax cut and on his war policy, and if either of these have disastrous results, he will not fare well. Nor will he fare well if he is defeated for reelection, which I don't think will happen.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2004 10:26 PM