Now consider Bush’s electoral advantages. He already commands the support of Texas, the second-most populous state in the nation. His brother, Jeb, is governor of Florida, giving Bush an edge in the fourth-most populous state. And given Bush’s appeal among Hispanics, he stands a good chance of carrying California, the most populous state. What Republicans therefore see in George W. Bush is something they haven’t had in a long time now—when my research assistant, a sophomore at Stanford, mentioned that he was just seven the last time a Republican captured the White House, I realized just how long: a presidential candidate who can win.
Yet the question that I asked myself after meeting Bush lingers in many Republican minds all the same. Why isn’t his character more sharply defined? Why doesn’t it have more heft? I myself found that the question of Bush’s character troubled me most when I compared him with a man who, like him, was born into privilege and then, like him, devoted himself to public service. The person I had in mind was his father.
By the time President Bush was as old as Governor Bush, he had served as a pilot in the Second World War, helped to build up the Republican Party in a Texas that was still solidly Democratic, and played a leading role in the decisive struggle of the second half of the twentieth century, the Cold War, confronting the Soviets as our ambassador at the United Nations. Compared with his father, it seemed to me, George W. Bush looked slight.
Then I had a disconcerting thought. Precisely the same could be said about me when compared with my own father. By the time he was my age, my father had worked his way through the Great Depression by digging ditches with a road crew, the only job he could find once he left high school, spent more than four years at sea during the Second World War, then returned home to marry and, without ever having had the chance to go to college, enter the workforce to support his family.
My point, of course, is that our parents and we—by “we” I mean my fellow baby boomers and I—had two entirely different sets of formative experiences. Our parents overcame the Depression, defeated Hitler, rebuilt the American economy, and sustained a long and finally successful struggle against the Soviet Union. Tom Brokaw’s book about our parents, The Greatest Generation, spent weeks on the best-seller list because it captured the truth. The events that shaped our parents made them into giants. We came of age during a long run of peace and prosperity. Our parents wanted it this way. They worked long and hard to give us just the world in which we grew up. The United States was secure. It provided a rapidly rising standard of living for its citizens. Peace and material well-being were, so to speak, our inheritance. But now we face the same question that always faces kids who inherit a lot. How can we live up to our old men?
The valid comparison isn’t between George W. Bush and his father. It’s between George W. Bush and members of our own generation. Compare Bush with me, and he looks good enough to have his face carved on Mount Rushmore. Compare Bush with his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination and, I would contend, he still looks pretty good.
Steve Forbes? I admire the boldness with which Forbes articulated an explicitly conservative agenda. But suggesting that voters send him directly from Forbes, a magazine that he and his brothers inherited, to the Oval Office? You could call that audacity. You could also call it lousy judgment. Steve Forbes should have run for the senate from New Jersey. I hope he still does. Gary Bauer? Alan Keyes? Both contributed to the campaign by raising the level of debate. But if either ever thought the voters should actually make him president, he was guilty of the same lousy judgment as Steve Forbes.
Now I come to John McCain.
McCain’s five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi set him apart from other baby boomers, needless to say. But while McCain seldom fails to display his remarkable past—photographs of McCain in his flying gear are often in evidence when he speaks, and McCain himself drops references to his years as a POW throughout his remarks—he is always a little vague when he describes the future. On foreign policy, he sounds emphatic enough, but his views lack any overall coherence. He announced his tax plan weeks after Bush made public his own plan, and an economist friend who has studied the McCain offering tells me that the numbers still don’t quite add up. Of course there is a reason for this. McCain pays little attention to policy because he understands that it is peripheral to his campaign. The man of character is running on character alone.
One McCain supporter I know granted every charge against McCain that I made. The tobacco deal that McCain supported in the Senate amounted to little better than a gigantic tax hike on smokers, mostly people of modest means. His campaign finance proposal is flatly unconstitutional. His tax plan would cut taxes by even less than the amount President Clinton proposed in his last state of the union address.
“Look, my issue profile fits a lot better with George W. Bush,” the McCain supporter said, “and I’m totally against McCain on his tax plan. But the issues threshold is lower these days. We’re not running in 1980. History no longer hangs in the balance. What the American people want after eight years of Bill Clinton is to take a shower.”
By “take a shower,” he of course meant repudiate Bill Clinton by defeating Al Gore. Fine and good. Lord knows I’d like to see Republicans do just that. But defeating Al Gore would require just one day, election day. Afterward, McCain would have almost three months to fill before taking his oath of office, then four years to get through before his term as president ended. Is it too much to ask how he would pass the time? What I see when I look at McCain, in short, is a curious paradox. By running on character alone, McCain is demonstrating a lack of character itself.
By contrast, George W. Bush has assembled a national campaign organization, an undertaking that none of his opponents, including McCain, who at this writing is still putting his state organizations together on the fly, ever even attempted. He has gathered knowledgeable advisers on every aspect of national policy. He has announced a tax plan that goes to the trouble of making certain the numbers all add up, an intricate exercise that, as I’ve said, McCain still hasn’t bothered to get right. He has detailed a foreign policy that amounts to the most impressive statement of American ends, and of the means we will need to accomplish those ends, put forward by any politician since the Cold War.
Bush’s positions lie squarely within the Republican tradition—and Republicans know it. Add up the Republican vote in the primaries that have taken place as of this writing—New Hampshire, Delaware, South Carolina, Michigan, and Arizona—and you’ll find that Bush defeats McCain by six percentage points. Toss in the Independent vote. Bush is still ahead, outpacing McCain by four percentage points. Only when you add the votes cast by Democrats—Democrats, mind you—does McCain come out on top.
Now, if John McCain wins the Republican presidential nomination, you can certainly count on me to support him. Even if McCain made up his policies as he went along, he’d be so much better as president than Al Gore that I wouldn’t have any trouble working up real enthusiasm for his cause, plastering my bumper with McCain stickers and putting a McCain button on my lapel. But I expect McCain to lose, not win. Over the next few weeks, it’s my guess, Republicans will rally to George W. Bush, the compassionate conservative, despite the insurgency of John McCain, the—well, the whatever it is that McCain is. And if I’m right, Bush will have added a second paradox to this campaign. By standing on the issues, he will have proven his character.
Journal entry:
Like all presidential libraries [I made this entry after attending the dedication of George Bush’s presidential library in College Station, Texas, in November 1998], the Bush Library includes a museum that displays various aspects of the president’s life. Wandering through the museum yesterday, I decided that the most impressive exhibit was an airplane, suspended from the ceiling, identical to the one in which George Bush was shot down over the Pacific during the Second World War. I happened to notice a couple of old geezers looking up at the plane. They were both wearing what
I at first took for baseball hats. Then I saw that the hats bore the inscription, “U.S.S. Finback.” The Finback. Of course. That was the submarine that pulled the eighteen-year-old George Bush out of the Pacific after he had spent the night on a raft, bobbing toward an island occupied by the Japanese. Old geezers? Heroes.
Across from the library itself an enormous tent, two or three times the size of a circus tent, had been erected for the festivities. Yesterday, the day before the dedication ceremonies, the tent was the site of a Texas barbecue—five or six hundred people, the men in jackets and ties, the women in suits and, many of them, jewels, seated at big round tables eating chicken with their fingers. President Bush went from table to table, greeting every person in the tent.
Then today, after the dedication ceremonies themselves, a second barbecue took place in the tent. The same five or six hundred people all returned to eat another round of chicken. But this time President Bush was absent; he and Mrs. Bush were in the library for a private luncheon with their guests, Lady Bird Johnson, President and Mrs. Ford, President and Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Reagan, and President and Mrs. Clinton. The figure who stood in for President Bush, circulating from table to table shaking hands, was Governor Bush.
Watching George W. Bush, it occurred to me that the political infrastructure that it had taken his father a lifetime to assemble—the people in the tent included scores of political operatives and donors—was passing intact from father to son. Then I began to wonder what the son’s presidential library might look like. Where his father’s library had an airplane hanging from the ceiling, would his have a scale model of the DKE house at Yale?
George W. Bush is smart enough to know that he’s been lucky. And now that we’re down to members of our generation I can’t think of anyone likely to do the job of president as well. If George W. Bush has the guts to go for the big one, the Republican Party ought to say a prayer of thanks.
YOU’RE A BIGOTED PERSON, MONROE
Probably the best way to see the mayor of New York City in action is not to see him at all but to hear him. Rudolph Giuliani hosts two live call-in radio shows every week. On a Friday morning in the spring of 1999, I sat in on one of the mayor’s broadcasts, WABC’s Live from City Hall. The setting, the mayor’s office in city hall, is a high-ceilinged room with a chandelier, paned windows, tasteful sofas and armchairs, and a thick carpet patterned with a geometric design. It conveys just the impression of sedate and historic tastefulness that many law firms and investment banks spend a great deal of money to attain. I almost expected to see Alexander Hamilton enter the room wearing a frock coat and a powdered wig. Instead Rudy Giuliani walked in in his shirtsleeves, his thinning hair swept back over his forehead. He nodded quickly to the radio technicians in the room, then sat down at his desk, beneath a portrait of his favorite mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, slipped on a pair of earphones, and tapped the microphone, asking a technician, “You’re sure this thing is working, right?” Waiting for airtime, Giuliani glanced over papers on his desk, making notes.
A technician announced that there was one minute to go. Glancing up, Giuliani noticed that I was trying to read the brass plaque on the front of his desk. “The desk was La Guardia’s,” he said. “Ed Koch used to use it. Then David Dinkins sent it off to Gracie Mansion [the official residence of New York’s mayors]. Can you believe that? I brought it back and had it raised. La Guardia was barely over four feet tall. I kept banging my knees.”
The technician began the countdown. Three … two … one.
“Hello, everybody,” the mayor began. “This is Rudy Giuliani speaking to you from city hall.” He would get to callers in a few moments, Giuliani explained, but first there were a few items he wanted to mention. In the course of the next three minutes he discussed half a dozen topics, staring off into the room as he engaged in a staccato, stream-of-consciousness monologue.
First he was the city historian, explaining the construction taking place around city hall. “We’re restoring City Hall Park to its nineteenth-century glory,” Giuliani said. When workers started turning up old objects, Giuliani had called in archaeologists. They had identified everything from minor, everyday items such as old bottles and toothbrushes to sites of major interest, including burial grounds. “The city has a history that goes back to 1625 when the Dutch first settled here. In the very early days, the character of the city was set, and the character of the city remains the same today. It’s a business city. The area of Wall Street was used for trading items way back as early as 1634 or 1635. Teachers, if you’re looking for a good field trip for your class, we’ll have a big historical display here in city hall when the construction is completed.”
Next Giuliani became the city’s top basketball fan. “Talking about the present, tonight the Knicks take on the San Antonio Spurs, and they’re down three games to one.” The mayor told his listeners not to worry. The Knicks would end the series by winning the next three games. “It’s exactly where the Knicks want to be, with their backs against the wall. In an underdog team, it’s the only way in which they can really function.” (The Knicks lost that night, ending the series.)
Next Giuliani became in effect the secretary of defense. Moving from a basketball team to the defense establishment of the entire nation, he conveyed no awareness that he had jumped from a small topic to a big one. He simply kept talking.
In a recent speech, Giuliani explained, he had mentioned that the Clinton administration had permitted the nation’s defense spending to fall to historic lows. “You know what? Somebody in the Clinton administration said my figures were wrong. So I went and checked. I was absolutely right.” Reading from a memo that a member of his staff had prepared—the only time throughout the broadcast that Giuliani referred to notes—he reeled off a string of figures. “Defense spending as a proportion of GDP,” he concluded, “has dropped to the lowest level since the Great Depression back in the 1930s, during the time that we were disarming after the First World War without anticipating the Second World War. So like I said, I was absolutely right.”
Then Giuliani became the city’s head nurse, urging New Yorkers to donate blood to the Red Cross, which was facing a shortage of Type O supplies. He wasn’t offering a pleasant suggestion. He was barking out a civic duty. “Everybody who’s eligible should donate now.” He had just donated blood to the Red Cross himself. “It doesn’t hurt—well, except for a little prick. It’s good for your character development, anyway.”
Next Giuliani took on the role of a priest, offering inspiration. He told the story of a young girl, Jamie, who was fighting a brave battle against cancer. He had been keeping his listeners posted on Jamie. “So I just wanted you to know that she graduated from fifth grade at P.S. 91 yesterday and she’s doing just fine. She inspires all of us about how to face life and make the most of it.”
The mayor tapped a pencil on his desk. Moving to the last topic before taking calls, he became New York’s social director. “And now to another point, the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade on Sunday. It’s going to be a terrific parade—a great opportunity for New York to show how we are the most tolerant, the most loving, the most understanding city, in which people of different views about politics, religion, and sexual orientation can see our connection as human beings.”
City Hall Park, the New York Knicks, the national defense budget, a Red Cross blood drive, a little girl fighting cancer, and the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. At first I couldn’t see anything uniting these disparate topics except the mayor’s intense nervous energy. Then I got it. Listening to Giuliani was like taking a walk down Broadway. You’d see office towers, theaters, diners, rich people, poor people, whites, blacks, Jews, and Hispanics, and all that united them would be the buzz and energy of the city. Rudy and the city, the city and Rudy. Say what you want about him, but he manages a feat that only a bravura politician could accomplish. He personifies New York.
The mayor handled the first three calls without incident. Rocco from Brooklyn, a guard in a public
school, called in to complain that his superiors had transferred him to guard duty in the prison on Rikers Island. Giuliani spent a few puzzled moments trying to figure out what had happened—a school guard should never have been transferred to prison duty—then told Rocco to stay on the line while he had somebody in one of the deputy mayor’s offices talk to him. “T’anks, Mayor,” Rocco said. “I t’ink you’re terrific.”
Anna from Harlem complained about garbage collection. Judith from Queens complained about bus service. Giuliani had them, too, stay on the line to speak to people in a deputy mayor’s office, but not before demonstrating a detailed knowledge of the routes of the city’s garbage trucks and buses. Anna and Judith both proved effusive in their thanks. Giuliani beamed and thanked them in return.
Then came the call from Monroe in Staten Island.
Monroe informed Giuliani that the Republican leader of the Senate, Trent Lott of Mississippi, had once spoken before a white supremacist group. Monroe asked whether the Republican mayor of New York approved of Lott or would be willing to denounce him over the air. As Monroe spoke, Giuliani’s smile disappeared. His forehead creased in concern. He glanced across the room at his press secretary, Sunny Mindel raising his eyebrows as if to ask whether she was aware of the charge against Senator Lott. Mindel shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it,” she mouthed. Giuliani shrugged back. Then he attacked.
“I get the sense that this is a set-up question,” Giuliani said. “I’ll tell you what, Monroe. What do you think Democrats should do about Al Sharpton?” Monroe began to accuse Giuliani of changing the subject, which Giuliani had certainly done. Giuliani cut him off.
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