-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- Bush Pursues `Next Endeavor' Personable candidate seems to lack driving reason to run for president Joan Ryan, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, February 25, 2000 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/25/MN138.DTL&type=electio n George W. Bush's bus is hurtling through the night, heading for one more rally on the eve of another primary. Already on this day, the Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate has done two network early- morning shows, a round-table discussion, four radio shows, three rallies, an interview with Dan Rather and four satellite feeds. He also lifted weights and ran five miles on a treadmill. ``I tell people this is the process to show whether I've got what it takes to be your president,'' he says, sitting next to his wife, Laura, on a black banquette in the front of the bus. He is slowly, almost imperceptibly, sliding deeper into the cushions, his only sign of weariness. Bush's advisers are strategizing in the back room of the bus while Bush talks with yet another journalist up front. The stiff-armed, winking, grinning candidate delivering packaged bromides at rallies is gone. The self- satisfied debater is gone. Bush is as gracious and likable as a man who had been voted head cheerleader at Andover prep school and fraternity president at Yale, whose favorite TV show is ESPN's ``Inside Baseball'' and who, during takeoffs on the campaign plane, delights in the schoolboyish ritual of rolling an orange down the aisle from his first-row seat past reporters to see if he can reach the back of the plane. Despite the lightly veiled references to a wilder side in his younger days, Bush seems to live the traditional sort of life he preaches. He calls home every night from the road. He refuses to use his 18-year- old twin daughters to boost his campaign. He reads four newspapers a day but watches little television. He writes thank-you notes by the dozens. He loves grass fields and wooden bats in baseball, and when he was managing partner of the Texas Rangers, he alone among 28 owners voted against interleague play and the wild-card playoffs. ``Baseball's a marathon,'' he says about the wild card. ``We shouldn't be rewarding second-place finishers.'' ``As you can tell,'' Laura teases, ``he's very persuasive. He didn't get any of the other owners to vote with him.'' Bush smiles, then sees an opening for weaving in a political message. ``I'll tell you this: I went down fighting for principle. I didn't take a poll to figure out how I should vote.'' Several times during the interview, he tells me I've asked the wrong question from the wrong perspective, and finally I offer him my notebook and suggest we skip the middleman and let him interview himself. He laughs and answers everything anyway, reframing questions to reflect his own point of view. When I ask him to articulate what he loves about public office, for example, he turns the question around. ``I don't love the office,'' he says emphatically. ``I love my country. I believe I've got some talents that will help achieve certain objectives that will make America a better place, like keeping the peace, like improving education, like keeping the economy going. And I have a vision for America that will usher in the Responsibility Era. ``Loving the office, to me, connotes, you know, strutting around like, `I am the governor. IIIIII am the governor.' '' CANDIDATE OR PASSENGER? As the darkened fields and factories and homes roll by the bus windows, and Bush's careful political packaging begins to loosen, the candidate shows conviction and compassion around certain issues that, in his public appearances, often come off as hollow posturing. But he also seems like a boy riding a bus not so much because he has his mind set on a particular destination, but because this happened to be the bus that came along. In other words, for someone who speaks so forcefully of helping Americans fulfill their dreams, he seems to have had none of his own. ``I've never been one to worry about what my next endeavor would be,'' he acknowledges, sucking on hard candies to save his voice. ``Somebody asked me once, `What are you going to do after governor?' I said, `I don't know.' I'm not the least bit worried about it, either, I want you to know. ``When I went to Harvard Business School in 1973, I just went. I didn't have a game plan. . . . A few months into my last year, someone asked, `What are you going to do?' I said, `I dunno.' But I knew what I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to Wall Street. I wasn't there to compete. I wasn't there to try to pad my resume.'' He ended up stopping at his boyhood town, Midland, Texas, on his way to visit a friend in Tucson, Ariz., and decided to stay. ``I started a little company and things went well,'' he says. ``It's the nature of my life.'' It seems not to occur to Bush as he says this that he sounds like the trust- funded, safety-netted, well- connected kid he was, the oldest of five children whose wealthy grandfather served in Congress and whose wealthy father became president. One senses he has yet to question why he has sailed along the path carved by his father, from Andover to Yale to the oil business to politics. (``Filling out blue books with pithy statements was not exactly my forte,'' he cracks about his less-than- sterling Andover days.) Despite coming of age during the Vietnam War and the counter-culture 1960s, Bush adopted his father's viewpoints as his own without, it seems, analyzing them too deeply for himself. For example, I asked him: Is it possible for a Christian to read the Bible carefully and thoughtfully and still not be pro-life? I tell him I am a pro-choice Christian. He stammers for a moment. ``I don't . . . that's an interesting question. I'm sure there are a lot of loyal Christians who are pro-choice. Um, I think the thing. . . . That's kind of an interesting question, because I don't want to condemn anybody. ``Listen, this is what religion is to me.'' He's finding his ground now, retrieving the familiar phrases. ``I'm a lowly sinner. I have sought redemption. And, ah, I'm, ah. . . .'' He sighs heavily. ``Far be it from me to condemn you, to say you're not a religious enough person. Who am I to judge your religiosity? So you're asking me to take your political points of view and determine what your relationship is with Christ. And I'm the least equipped to do that.'' But, I wanted to know, isn't his pro-life position based in his faith? This is the candidate, after all, who cited Jesus as the greatest influence on his political beliefs. ``My pro-life position is, I believe there's life. It's not necessarily based in religion. I think there's life there.'' He goes no further. Bush is sharper in explaining how he comes to a decision when the principles of his religion and the principles of what he considers good government seem at odds, such as with the death penalty. He is spirited but patient in his explanation, having heard the question many times before. As governor, he says, his job is to uphold the law of the land, and capital punishment is the law. But he says he also supports capital punishment personally, despite the Sixth Commandment. He believes that in the long run, it saves the lives of future victims of the killer and of potential victims of would- be murderers who are deterred by fear of the death penalty. ``I'm gonna put this in perspective for you,'' Bush says, now sitting up and leaning toward me. ``You mentioned God's law. You see, God's law from the Christian perspective really deals with what happens after you leave Earth, in many ways. That's what acceptance of Christ is. ``I can't judge a murderer's heart. The law can judge his crime and whether he was able to get full access to the courts, but far be it from me to judge what's in somebody's heart. I don't get to decide who goes to heaven. I just get to decide to uphold the law that says, `You made your choice.' '' He settles back on the banquette and smiles. ``This does sound like a San Francisco interview,'' he jokes. CONCERN FOR THE POOR What comes through in private that often doesn't in public is his own sense of connection to the minority underclass. Even when he does speak up on behalf of the poor, it often slips by unmentioned. At most rallies in conservative South Carolina, for example, Bush asked the crowds to remember that illegal Mexican immigrants are parents, too, and they want the same things for their children that all parents do: food on the table, a better life. ``Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande,'' he says. The answer is not to build walls to keep them out, but to help Mexico's economy grow through more open markets so they no longer have to cross the border for a decent life, he says. But at another rally, Bush unwittingly reinforced his white, elitist image when he stood on stage with a singing and clapping African American gospel choir and clapped so completely off rhythm that he finally had to step away. In private, however, he is intensely interested in elevating minority students' achievements. He clearly has thought about the problems in the nation's public schools and advocates complicated, even radical, changes. He wants education programs individually tailored, so students don't get passed along simply by virtue of their age. He wants to tap the best minds of Silicon Valley to design new kinds of schools. He supports charter schools -- and more government help in raising the capital to start them. He wants much greater funding of Head Start to prepare more children for learning. ``Life is not so despondent that kids can't learn,'' he says. ``I believe kids can learn. What I'm telling you is, it can happen. But we have to understand we can't just leap from here to there. There's an evolution. And a person like me, during my short period of time in public office, is here to encourage and enhance that evolution.'' Yet for all his enthusiasm and energy, Bush comes across as someone who has yet to come up with a driving reason to be president. He is running mostly, it seems, because the country's Republicans asked him. He would be loyal to the party and, perhaps most important, he seems manageable, someone with apparently no grand ideas or philosophy about what he'd like to do as president. I wondered what Bush considered his expertise. So I asked: If he walked into a classroom today and had to teach something for a semester without a textbook, what could he teach? His answer was perhaps more revealing than he intended. ``Modern American politics,'' he quickly answered. But he didn't mean governance. ``I'd walk people through a campaign. I've been in a lot of campaigns, so I could explain very clearly how the political process works. I guess I would start with what it means to be a candidate and the role of a candidate. I'd go from there to the roles of the different major players in a campaign. I'd look at the advertising, message, themes, how a candidate develops issues and the timing of campaigns. I've got a very good sense of timing in campaigns.'' Bush seems a little like the college kid for whom the letter on his sweater is more important than actually playing on the team. He's a great candidate with ``great timing,'' a decent man who could become president without ever setting out to be, a cork on a stream, bobbing toward Pennsylvania Avenue. GEORGE W. BUSH --Born: July 6, 1946, New Haven, Conn. --Education: B.A. Yale University (1968), MBA Harvard University (1975). --Military service: Texas Air National Guard (1968-1973). --Political career: Governor of Texas (1995-present). --Family: Wife, Laura; twin daughters. --Message: That he is a ``compassionate conservative'' and a reformer who gets results. --Quote: ``California is the place, when they see I'm willing to open up my arms to new faces and new voices, and welcome new folks into the Republican Party, then I think the people of this state will say, `I want to support Gov. George W. Bush.'' --Web site: www.georgewbush.com. ©2000 San Francisco Chronicle ----------------- RECOMMENDED BOOKS http://www.bmvs.com/sites/anomalous/books/recommend.asp RECOMMENDED VIDEOS http://www.bmvs.com/sites/anomalous/videos/recommend.asp ANOMALOUS IMAGES WEBSITE http://www.anomalous-images.com <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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