It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  The Unz Initiative represented the second approach to Hispanics that Republicans in California have attempted: treating Hispanics like everybody else.

  In lining up support for the initiative, Ron recruited Alice Callaghan, a prominent left-wing activist, and several prominent Hispanics, including Jaime Escalante, the public school teacher portrayed in the movie Stand and Deliver. Ron made no effort to gather endorsements from prominent Republicans. “I was trying to win the support of Hispanics, not drive them away,” Ron explained. “The last thing I wanted was an endorsement from Pete Wilson.” Although many Republicans, including Pete Wilson, supported the measure—“Unz and I have our differences,” Pete told me, “but he did a great thing with Prop. 227”—they did so quietly.

  Ron’s strategy almost worked.

  Up until the week of the election, polls showed that more than 60 percent of Hispanics supported the Unz Initiative. Then opponents of the initiative began blanketing the state with television ads, outspending Ron and the other backers of the initiative by about twenty-five to one. (It later emerged that money for the advertising campaign came largely from the owner of Univision, the Spanish-language television network. He seems to have opposed the Unz Initiative not because he thought it would fail but because he thought it would work, reasoning that if Hispanic children learned English, he would lose his captive audience.) Although on election day itself the Unz Initiative passed with 61 percent of the vote, just 40 percent of Hispanics voted for it. Ron was downhearted—for a couple of weeks. Then polls began to indicate that Hispanic support for the measure was rebounding. Soon Hispanics once again backed the Unz Initiative just as strongly as they had before the ad campaign against it. “Political ads can only rent support,” Ron says, “not buy it.

  “Hispanics didn’t come here to go on welfare or rip off California’s taxpayers,” Ron told me, “and their support for Prop. 227 proves it. They came here to become Americans. They have a strong work ethic. They believe in family values. As Catholics, they’re pro-life. They’re natural Republicans. But the Republican Party just can’t seem to stop insulting them.”

  * * *

  As I was leaving Hope Lutheran Church, I noticed a Hispanic man in the reception area. Pastor Bentz told me he was the janitor. I asked him to join me in the church hall for a cup of coffee.

  His name was Gregorio Leal, but he asked me to call him Greg. In his mid-fifties, his hair still jet black, Greg explained that he had been born into an extended migrant family. “My great-grandfather was the man of the family. He was the one who heard where there was work and decided where we would go next.” The family followed farmwork from Texas, where Greg was born, throughout the Southwest and California. They moved constantly. The work—picking and packing crops—was hard. Greg decided early that he wanted a different life. “I just didn’t want to run around,” he said. “I didn’t want to follow the crops.”

  In 1965 Greg joined the army. He performed three tours of duty in Vietnam.

  “Three?” I asked. “I thought nobody had to do more than one.”

  “The second and third times, I volunteered,” Greg replied. “I can’t say I liked it. But compared to picking crops, it was easy money.”

  When Greg returned from Vietnam, he attended Fresno City College, earning a two-year associate’s degree. Then he went to work as a custodian with the Fresno Unified School district. He married, bought a house, and raised three children, sending all three to college. When he retired he discovered that sitting at home all day bored him, so he went to work as the janitor at Hope Lutheran Church.

  Greg had made something of himself. He had lived the American dream. The son of migrant workers, he had served in the military, gone to college, and become a husband, a father, and a hardworking, home-owning member of the middle class. He is a person any member of the GOP would be proud to call a fellow Republican. How does he vote? “I go both ways, but mostly Democratic,” Greg said. What did he think of Proposition 187? “Deep inside myself, I thought Governor Wilson was wrong. I thought it came from prejudice. It’s hard to forget.”

  Inside the Finkelstein Box, Greg was living in his own box. If the GOP had ever made an effort to persuade him to leave it, Greg hadn’t noticed.

  Chapter Nine

  GEORGE AND RUDY’S

  EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

  Journal entry:

  George W. Bush isn’t the only person whose plans have been upset by John McCain.

  I did much of the reporting for this chapter when it seemed unthinkable that anyone other than George W. Bush would win the Republican presidential nomination. As I compose these words, Bush has lost to McCain in New Hampshire, came back to beat McCain in South Carolina, but then has lost to McCain once again in Michigan and Arizona—and my editor wants the manuscript at the end of this week. I would almost have been happier if by now Bush had suffered a clean defeat, finding himself forced to withdraw from the primary. At least then I could have tossed the Bush material out, rewriting the chapter as if I had known McCain would win all along.

  Oh, well. I never said this would be a book of prognostication, just a travelogue. All I can do is describe the terrain as it appeared when I saw it. If Bush wins, I’ll look prescient. If he loses, I’ll look foolish. On the other hand, after devoting an entire book to the Republican Party, looking foolish should probably be the least of my worries.

  Journal entry, composed three months after the journal entry above:

  I simply cannot believe it. After I sent in the manuscript to be proofread, George W. Bush came back to defeat John McCain for the GOP presidential nomination, permitting me to feel certain that I would look prescient, not foolish, after all. But now Rudolph Giuliani, who I assumed would be the Republican senatorial candidate in New York, has announced that he has prostate cancer, that he has been conducting an extramarital affair, that he has decided to seek a formal separation from his wife, and that in view of his health and personal problems he is reconsidering his candidacy. “It’s too late to change anything you’ve already written,” my editor told me this afternoon, after Giuliani announced that he intends to separate from his wife. “But if you keep them short and get them to me tomorrow, you can add three paragraphs.” Three paragraphs, of which this is the first.

  What is there to say? Even now, Giuliani might decide to stay in the race. And if he dropped out, he could still choose to remain a force in Republican politics, perhaps running for governor of New York in 2002 if Pataki takes his place in this year’s Senate race. I hope he does one or the other—and that by the end of Chapter Nine, the reader will see why. But if Giuliani decided to leave politics altogether, I couldn’t blame him. How could I? Republicans believe in the primacy of private life. Attending to his health, straightening out his relationships with his wife and, as he described her, his “good friend,” and devoting himself to his two young children—that may be the most, well, the most Republican course of action that Giuliani could take.

  His decision is expected later this week. In the meantime, I’m trying to get used to the idea of looking foolish, not prescient, all over again.

  George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani. Two men could hardly differ more dramatically. In the notes I made during the day I spent traveling with George W. Bush in California in the spring of 1999, I described him as handsome, relaxed, a guy’s guy, good at making small talk, the kind of man who would rather watch a football game than read a book and isn’t embarrassed to say so, a person who wants to make everyone his friend. This last characteristic struck me most forcefully of all. At an event in Sacramento celebrating an athletic program for underprivileged teens, most of whom were black and Hispanic, Bush threw a football to one kid after another, tossing them passes in nice, tight spirals. That much was standard for a politician—posing for action shots with kids. But afterward, Bush lingered with the kids, talking to them. He shook their hands, patted them on the back, put his hand on their shoulders. They weren’t even old enough to vote,
but he wanted them to like him.

  After spending time with Rudolph Giuliani at city hall a few months later, I described him in almost the opposite terms. Giuliani is striking rather than handsome, intense, cerebral, better at discussing policy than at making small talk, a man who conveys the impression that he actually reads memoranda and briefing books of the kind with which his desk was littered, a person less interested in making people like him than any other politician I have ever met.

  “Mr. Mayor, you’ve turned this city around,” I said. “Why don’t people like you more?”

  Giuliani smiled and shrugged. “I just don’t know,” he replied. His tone indicated that he didn’t particularly care, either.

  One the product of a patrician WASP family, the other an Italian Catholic from Brooklyn. One the governor of Texas, a state in which people think of New York City as the very embodiment of everything that’s wrong with America, the other the mayor of New York City, a metropolis in which Texas is the punch line of a joke. Yet there they are, George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani, the two most compelling Republicans in the country.

  John McCain? Yes, I will come to him.

  THE CHARACTER FROM TEXAS

  Journal entry:

  This afternoon [I wrote this entry in the winter of 1998] I spent an hour with the governor of Texas. In Washington for the annual meeting of the National Governors’ Association, he had asked a few old Reagan speechwriters to stop by his hotel suite. He wanted advice on setting up a speech-writing operation in Austin. “The reason is,” he said, “I’m thinkin’ about runnin’ for president.”

  In the course of the meeting Bush reminded me of three different people. First he reminded me of his father. He had the same small, blue eyes, the same furrow in his forehead when he listened intently, even the same way of puckering his lips and twisting his mouth to one side in thought, a gesture so singular that I would have guessed it could only have been duplicated by cloning. Then as he cracked jokes, made tart comments, and chomped an unlit cigar, he reminded me of his mother, a woman who is sharp, quick, funny, and so intent on enjoying herself that if she were a man she would chomp unlit cigars herself. Last, relating a story he used in his speeches, he reminded me of Reagan. He was in a prison, Bush said, visiting young detainees. One black teen had looked him in the eye and asked, “What do you think of me?” The moment had stayed with him. “What kids like that need,” he said, “is to know they’re not forgotten.” The poignancy with which Bush told the story fails to translate into print, but he was nearly as moving as Reagan himself would have been.

  One part his father’s son, one part his mother’s son, one part Reagan. Not a bad mix for a presidential candidate, I thought afterward. Then a second thought occurred to me. Bush had reminded me of other people almost too readily. Who was he?

  If you wanted to make the strongest case against the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, you’d certainly raise the question of his character. It can seem to lack solidity or heft, permitting voters to read into him whatever they’d like, seeing, for example, his father, or, for that matter, I suppose, their own fathers. In New Hampshire last autumn, according to Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, a majority of voters told pollsters that they believed George W. Bush agreed with them on the issues and that they didn’t know where he stood on the issues. “People just see in him whatever they want,” Kellyanne said. “He’s that kind of candidate.”

  Then there is the life story of George W. Bush. It isn’t exactly an epic. Bush coasted through Yale, settling for gentleman’s Cs. He proceeded from Yale to Harvard Business School, incubator of business titans, then, returning to Texas, failed to become a business titan, instead founding an oil company that went bust. The deal that finally made Bush’s fortune was the 1989 purchase of the Texas Rangers. In return for an investment of just over $600,000, of which he borrowed $500,000, Bush received a stake in the team of 1.8 percent. Under the terms of the contract, Bush received an additional 10 percent of the team for serving as general manager. In 1998, when the team was sold, Bush’s share of the proceeds came to nearly $15 million. Two points about these transactions are worth noting. The first is that it appears doubtful Bush would have been cut in if his name had been George W. Humperdinck. The second is that the bulk of the profits came not from baseball but from that other national pastime, real estate. The city of Arlington, Texas, built the Texas Rangers a new stadium, named, a little obviously, The Ballpark in Arlington. It paid for the stadium by adding half a cent to the city sales tax. Then the city agreed to charge the team $5 million a year in rent and maintenance, applying the money to the purchase of the stadium at the end of 12 years for a round $60 million. Since that was the amount the team would already have paid, the city in effect agreed to hand the stadium over for nothing. Now, there was nothing underhanded or shady about the arrangement between the Texas Rangers and the city of Arlington—indeed, the people of Arlington overwhelmingly approved of the arrangement in a 1991 referendum. Yet when the Texas Rangers were sold in 1998, a number of observers believe, the stadium was worth more than the team. The Ballpark in Arlington was the house the taxpayers built, and it made Bush rich.

  Even the moment in 1987 when, at the age of forty, Bush quit drinking, turns out to have been less of an accomplishment than it might seem. At dinner with friends one night, he drank too much. The next morning he went for a jog, developed a headache, and decided to give up drinking. Just like that. He never underwent anything remotely akin to the struggle of a genuine alcoholic. All George W. Bush appears to have done instead is drop an adolescent habit a little later in life than most frat boys.

  Yet by the time this book appears, the former president of the DKE fraternity at Yale may very well stand only a day or two away from receiving the Republican nomination for president of the United States. As early as the spring of 1999, when I spent a couple of days traveling with him in California, Bush had established himself as the front-runner. His lead over his opponents for the Republican nomination was more than 40 percentage points. He had already raised over $30 million, more than all his opponents for the nomination combined. Bush had acquired the trappings not just of a leading candidate for president but of a president himself. He crisscrossed the state in a Boeing 707. He drove through Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley in motorcades, Bush himself in a limousine, his staff following in sedans, the press at the rear in two big buses, police on motorcycles everywhere. At each of his stops, crowds gathered, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. One reporter, looking out the window of the press bus at Bush, who was signing photographs for a moment before stepping into his limousine, shook his head and muttered, “Just look at it. He’s already got everything but the sirens.”

  A frat boy? Who already had everything but the sirens? Why did Republicans permit this to happen?

  Because the frat boy came to their rescue.

  After watching both George Bush and Bob Dole go down in defeat to Bill Clinton, after seeing the Republican majority in the House of Representatives shrink over the last five and a half years from 26 to just 11 seats, after observing the rout that the GOP candidates for governor and senator suffered in California in 1998, Republicans had come to think of themselves as Nell, tied to the railroad tracks as the whistle of an approaching train shrieks in the distance. George W. Bush was their Dudley Do-Right, the man who had come to cut the ropes, lift the Republicans onto his steed, and gallop away to safety.

  Tick down the list of problems for the Republican Party that we have encountered in this book. George W. Bush solves nearly every one.

  The divide between economic and social conservatives? The two sides may loathe each other, but they both fawn over Bush. Economic conservatives see him as practical and down-to-earth. “A lot of us here in the valley have operations in Texas,” I heard John Chambers, president and CEO of Cisco Systems, say at a fund-raising event for Bush in Silicon Valley. “We know we can do business with him.” Social conservatives believe
Bush shares their values. For all the hell-raising Bush may have done as a fraternity president, today he is a born-again Christian, a devout Methodist who makes certain to turn up in church every Sunday.

  The danger that the GOP has become too southern? That it risks alienating everyone who doesn’t speak with a drawl? George W. Bush was raised in Texas. Yet he was educated, so to speak, abroad, attending Andover, Yale, and Harvard. When southerners look at him, they see not a Yankee but one of their own. When northerners look at him, they see not a redneck but the product of a New England education.

  The GOP’s difficulty in attracting African-Americans, Catholics, and single women? Bush has proposals that appeal to each. His education program includes vouchers, which, as we have seen, have the support of African-Americans. His welfare reforms include “faith-based initiatives,” programs that, as we have also seen, would transfer some of the functions now performed by government agencies to private organizations, including religious groups, an instance of compassionate conservatism that Catholics and single women find reassuring.

  The need to win over Hispanics? Hispanics, polls indicate, take to Bush as to no other presidential candidate. For his part Bush has wooed them as he has no other group. He delivered portions of both his inaugural addresses as governor in Spanish. He has appointed Hispanics to high positions in his administration. When he visits their neighborhoods, Bush appears so much at ease with Hispanics that they might as well be members of his family (which, for that matter, some are—Bush has Hispanic nephews and a Hispanic niece, the children of his brother Jeb, who is married to a Mexican). Hispanics respond by returning the compliment, treating Bush like one of their own.