The paradoxical Republican, who is more concerned with getting results than with ideology, hopes to unite a deeply divided party, ANDREW MARSHALL reports.
WASHINGTON - Deep in the heart of Texas, according to the old song, "the stars at night are big and bright."
George W. Bush, the Republican candidate for President of the United States, is neither. He is 1.8m, a good 5cm shorter than Al Gore, his Democratic opponent, and nearly 10cm less than Bill Clinton. And his frequent gaffes have given the impression of a man who, while by no means an idiot, is not the sharpest tool in the shed.
But he sure is a Texan. Bush will frequently remind us of that at the Republican convention this week, telling us in his West Texas drawl how much he loves "Emerka," explaining his "sussesses," and setting out why he wants to be "Prezdint." His very nickname, "Dubya," comes from the West Texan pronunciation of his middle initial.
Yet his relationship with Texas - which is both profound and ambiguous - says a lot about this man, and the curious paradoxes of his personality. It helps to explain why some people see him as the best hope for his party to recapture the White House after eight years of Clinton; but others regard him as nothing more or less than a tool.
Through his youth, his early years in business, his time as Governor of Texas and now his run for the White House, Bush has always had to accept comparisons and contrasts with his father. George Bush, the patrician Republican who ran the Republican Party, the CIA and then the country, was loved by many who saw him as the standard bearer of old-fashioned Republicanism, conservative but not ideological. Others loathed George the father, the emblem of upper-class East Coast wimpishness and privilege.
George the son wants and needs to transcend both images, and his strong links with Texas - stronger than those of his father, brought up in the North East - help to do that. "Unlike his father, George W. Bush will never have to fend off accusations that he lacks Texas roots," wrote Clifford Pugh of the Houston Chronicle. "While the Texas Governor doesn't have Lyndon Johnson's deep drawl, there are traces of his West Texas upbringing in almost every syllable."
That Texas drawl symbolises two other things as well. Bush is not part of the semi-permanent Washington population, the crowd of lobbyists, hacks, bag-carriers, politicians and lawyers who run the country. He is, like Clinton, part of the wider America; Gore was brought up in a luxury hotel in Dupont Circle, a 15-minute walk to the White House.
Bush has his roots in business, not politics. He ran an oil company; he has got his hands dirty. And he ran a baseball team, the Texas Rangers. He understands how the numbers have to add up, and he is more concerned with getting results than with ideology.
That is the message, one with which Bush will hope to heal the many entrenched divisions between the centre and the right of the party.
These messages will be embedded in this week's convention, in the videos, films, speeches, and off-the-record briefings with which the party will launch Bush on the trail to the White House.
He "has mellowed into the noble underdog, champion of Everyman, populist and smart," says the Washington Post, quoting Karl Rove, Bush's Machiavellian campaign adviser. "He got his values from Midland, Texas, where people don't care if you went to Yale, or what your name is - where you get ahead based on hard work and luck."
There is an element of truth in it; but much to gainsay it as well. And one of the main exports of Texas, let us not forget, alongside oil and cattle, is myth. It is not for nothing that it has given us some of the most enduring cultural images of America - the cowboy, the Alamo, the oilman and the cattle baron - but also some of its most modern cultural icons: the western novels of Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy, the television show Dallas and Willy Nelson's bitter-sweet music.
Bush is a Texan in the sense that he was brought up there. He went to school out in Midland, that part of West Texas where oil is king and life was still tough back in the 1950s and 1960s. But not that many Texans have had his advantages in terms of money, family and education. While he may have started in Midland, he went on to include Yale and the Harvard Business School on his CV.
He returned to the state to do business. But the nature of that business was not quite the roustabout life of blowouts and gushers. If the image which comes to mind is Giant, the epic tale of love and hydrocarbons starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, think again. Bush was in the back office, with the accountants.
"Bush called himself an oil man, but he never actually found much oil," wrote columnist Lars-Erik Nelson. "He made his money from holes that had been drilled in the tax code, not in the ground." His first business was financed by wealthy relatives; later companies flourished once the Bush name was more prominent, and Dad was in the White House as Vice-President.
In business, as later in politics, he was happy to use the family's contacts and even the name when it helped, while maintaining that he was his own man, self-created.
He is, in many ways, the latest descendant of an age-old Texan tradition: the immutable fusion of power, money and family. Texas is a remarkable state, with the memory of itself as a nation. Its massive economy has gone far beyond the old mainstays of cotton, cattle and oil to embrace newer industries - Dell Computers, Intel and the software sector around Austin, or medical technology and care in Houston.
But the power structure remains in many ways entrenched and rigid, forged by a world of primary industries and the immense cash which it produced, enriching a small elite at the expense of others. A few wealthy families are welded together in the pursuit of self-interest, and they favour, for the most part, Bush.
He has tried very hard to distance himself from the image of privilege, and it has worked to some extent. The most dangerous part of the allegations about drug use which have floated around is not so much the drugs themselves; it is of the picture of a leisured young man with time and money on his hands. His military career, too, while nothing to be ashamed of, is equivocal: while the sons of poor families from San Antonio or East Texas were losing their lives in Vietnam, Bush flew in an Air National Guard unit in Houston.
Yet Bush has a talent for politics. He has been elected twice as Governor of Texas, and not just because every state is doing well at a time of national boom. Go and watch him on the campaign trail, and you see a man who is skilled at retail politics: genuine, interested, funny and charming. He has brought more Hispanics to the party; he has even won a portion of the black vote, which the Democrats usually regard as theirs by right. And by the standards of Texas, he is - though conservative - relatively moderate.
Bush has made his campaign slogan the pursuit of "compassionate conservatism," putting a more human face on to a party which sometimes seems rigid, ideological and bitter, a party of angry middle-aged white men. He has gathered a team of advisers who represent the old elite, but also new faces: Condoleeza Rice, the black woman who runs foreign policy for him, JC Watts, the black Republican from Oklahoma, and Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
What does this mean? Every effort to define "compassionate conservatism' seems to run into the sands. And Bush did little to spell it out during the bitter primary campaign against John McCain, his rival for the Republican nomination.
McCain outflanked Bush for the moderate Republican vote in the New Hampshire primary; so Bush went down to South Carolina intent on securing the party's core on the right wing. He paid homage at Bob Jones University, the ultra-conservative institution where interracial dating was banned and Catholics were vilified. The question seemed to be: which is the real George W? The man who courts the right and whistles Dixie, or the gentler soul who called for a touch of tenderness towards minorities and the dispossessed?
But then the question about Bush's ideology is just part of a much broader uncertainty about the man's identity. He wants to be seen as the son of his father, but not his father's son; and as an outsider with an insider's skills and contacts. His compassionate conservatism is, to his enemies, either a tautology or a contradiction in terms.
His great task this week, as the party comes together to anoint his candidacy, is to maintain these uncertainties. The Republicans are deeply divided over social issues like abortion and homosexuality, and it is Bush's task to paper over the cracks. The party wants to win; it believes he can achieve that, and it will do its best to pull together for him.
Many of the weaknesses which the media confidently predicted would bring him down - the murky past, the memory of his father, his temper, his legendary gaffes - have not mattered. They may matter more in the future when he is pitched against a well-funded, disciplined and often brutal opponent, Gore, but he is ahead in the polls. He could win. Betting against him at the moment does not look that smart.
But trying to imagine Bush's America - or Dubya's Emerka, more appropriately - is hard. Is it the warm, embracing vision of compassionate conservatism, seeking to raise everyone and disdain none, somewhere in between the communal spirit of Lonesome Dove and a Lyle Lovett song; or is it the hard, sometimes cruel world of modern Texas, autocratic, overfond of the death penalty and none too keen on trade unions, a mixture of JR and the Texas Blues?
Trying to find the answer to that question in Bush's past is tough. It is one of the successes of his campaign over the past year that the very question seems impenetrable, lost somewhere in the myths of Texas and the image-making of modern American politics.
- INDEPENDENT
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