-Caveat Lector-
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 21:05:01 -0500
The Progressive June 1999
Author: Ivins, Molly
Title: The Scoop on George Dubya.(Governor George W. Bush)
by Molly Ivins
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1999 Progressive Inc.
OK, Dubya. Everybody wants to know about Dubya. He's the Man, the Republican
nominee, the next President of the United States. All the polls say so. The
inevitable nominees and next-Presidents the polls have been wrong about is
without number but--like Charlie Brown and the football--the press corps falls
for the same trick every time. At about this point in the 1992 election,
practically no one outside Arkansas had ever heard of Bill Clinton, and
Dubya's daddy had a 90 percent approval rating.
Poor Shrub, what an awful position to be in: frontrunner about whom nothing
is known, suffering from inflated expectations worse than the Superman balloon
in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. He can't speak, he can't govern, he
doesn't have any ideas, he's done almost nothing--what can he do but
disappoint people?
He is, however, a nice guy. You'd really have to work at it to dislike
George Dubya Bush. He is, as we say in our quaint Texas fashion, affable out
the ass.
Perhaps the chief misunderstanding abroad about Dubya is that he has been
governor of Texas for the last four years. Texas has what is known in
political science circles as "the weak-governor system." All the Southern
states have it: It's a hangover from Reconstruction, and Texas has it worse
than most. If you win two terms as Texas governor, by the end of that time you
might have a majority of your appointees on some important commissions, but
that would be about it.
By virtue of the state constitution and the senate rules, our lieutenant
governor usually has more power than the governor. Until this year, the Lite
Guv was Bob Bullock, a wily old trout, and Shrub was just smart enough to do
whatever Bullock told him to. There grew a father-son relationship between the
two to the extent that Bullock, a lifelong Democrat, endorsed Shrub for
reelection in 1998.
But we still don't know whether Shrub can govern anything. On the evidence,
he's not greatly interested in governance. If you think his daddy had trouble
with "the vision thing," wait'll you meet this one. He doesn't seem to read
about or know about or care much about how government actually works. To this
day, when someone comes in to see him about some fairly complex subject--say,
nursing home regulation or home health care--his response is to spread his
arms wide and announce, "I don't know anything about it, you'll have to talk
to so-and-so on my staff." In our more optimistic moments, we consider this
evidence that he knows how to delegate. For just one for-instance, Wisconsin's
Tommy Thompson is a much better governor.
But Shrub does have some real political skills, and political skill should
not be despised. He has done two very smart things.
First, he knew he had to go after the Hispanic vote. Texas becomes
majority-minority in 2003, and Hispanics have already passed blacks as our
largest minority. Unlike that doofus Pete Wilson in California, Bush has never
attacked Hispanics, blamed "illegal aliens" for the state's problems, or
proposed to kick the children of illegals out of school. Instead, he spent an
enormous amount of his time as governor going to Tejano political, cultural,
and social events, getting to know most of the players by sight and first
name. According to his office, he speaks Spanish, although fluent Spanish
speakers doubt that. He can easily read a couple of sentences in Spanish;
conversation is a different matter. At to-dos, they tend to cue the mariachis
after he's done his two sentences.
Second, he has accomplished a formidable straddle by keeping a moderate face
on the Texas Republican Party while the entire operation has been completely
taken over by the Christian Right. It's difficult to exaggerate the extent to
which the Texas Republican Party is now run by the Christian Right: chair,
vice-chairs, grassroots, lock, stock, and barrel. At their convention in Fort
Worth three years ago, they voted against a resolution in favor of civility,
pretty much on the grounds that it was a secular plot. It was quite a moment.
While Bush is by class, birth, and education part of the American elite,
which is, in turn, largely Christian as a matter of good form, Dubya claims to
have had a "born again" experience--at the instigation of Billy Graham, which
is, in itself, somewhat Establishment. He also became a teetotaler at age
forty.
The Christian Right has never considered him, as was also true of his
father, sufficiently militant against abortion. Dubya's position is that he is
completely opposed to it--except for rape, incest, and life of the mother--but
that a constitutional amendment outlawing it is not feasible. That straddle
works if you're governor of Texas and can't do dog about abortion; if you're
running for President and will be naming people to the U.S. Supreme Court, it
doesn't work.
Dubya's daddy, bless his heart, was and is more culturally an upper-class,
Eastern WASP than he ever was or will be a Texan. But Shrub is culturally a
Texan, or at least more a hybrid than his father. He speaks fluent good ol'
boy, and his preferred method of getting along with men, in all-male company,
is the classic wheeha, hey-boy, which is fine with me.
Of first-generation culturally hybrid Texans--Jim Baker, for example--it has
been possible to observe that they're just like all the other elite Eastern
WASPs, except with more street smarts. It's hard to tell with Dubya because
the fact is he's never had to really work or fight for anything in his whole
life. Asked what was the most difficult decision he ever had to make, he
replied: getting married.
It's silly to say that if his name were George Dubya Smith, no one ever
would have heard of him. It isn't; get over it. On the other hand, the
alarmingly large majority of his entire life has been shaped by the one simple
fact--the name.
His political philosophy, such as it is, is robbed, vitiated, and made
ironic by that one fact. He likes to tell people they have to take
responsibility for their own lives, stand on their own two feet, not depend on
the government. But he's never done it himself. His bidness career was a
couple of cushy berths, courtesy of his name. At Harken Energy Corp., there
are some serious ethical improprieties, in my opinion more grave than anything
Bill Clinton was ever accused of in Whitewater.
Cut to the Texas Rangers baseball team. Dubya used government--to wit, a
sales tax increase on the citizens of Arlington, Texas--to pay for a new
baseball stadium. He bought into the Rangers for a reported $606,000 and sold
last year for $14.9 million. Nice piece of change. Then he ran for governor on
his daddy's name. There it is.
But he never would have won without real political skill, and Ann Richards,
even running the worst campaign of her life, was no pushover. It was a
completely depressing election: The issues were God, gays, and guns. Richards
had vetoed the concealed weapons law and appointed a few (two, as I recall,
out of hundreds of appointments) openly gay people to state boards. Her
campaign workers made up a game that year: You had to put a bumper-sticker on
your car, drive through East Texas, and anyone who made it back to Waco alive
was a winner. The bumper-sticker had to say: I'M THE QUEER/ANN SENT HERE/TO
TAKE YUR GUN AWAY.
Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
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