The Family (80 page)

The little old lady shook her veiled head. “No, I want you to have it all, Mr. Bush. I want you to win.”

“Well,” said George. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll keep a hundred dollars and you keep nine hundred dollars and we’ll both win. That’s what we’ll do.”

She smiled gratefully.

“It was such a sweet gesture on his part,” recalled Ruth Gilson. “Others might have seen it as patronizing, but I didn’t. In a crowd of fat-cat lobbyists that little woman in her tattered coat looked like someone’s poor grandmother, and he responded sensitively.”

Much like his father’s, however, George W.’s compassion tended to extend only to those who were loyal and helpful to the family. It also extended to those who were in the family’s tax bracket.

Even before announcing his candidacy, George had raised $40 million, which anointed him the clear-cut front-runner. Rove’s strategy had been to get him crowned before he ascended the throne. “If you are the establishment choice on the Republican side, you are the inevitable nominee,” Rove told a group of lobbyists in Austin. “No ifs, ands or buts.” By the end of 2000, George had raised more than $193 million to Gore’s $133 million, making their race the most expensive presidential campaign in history.
Newsweek
said that George had assembled the greatest fund-raising machine in politics. His single largest financial backer was the credit-card company MBNA, which contributed $240,000 and gave him use of the company plane. The CEO, Charles Cawley, a Bush family friend, was paid $50 million a year by the company he founded. He was a Ranger for Bush, which meant he had to raise over $200,000. He raised $369,156 for the presidential campaign and then personally contributed $100,000 to the Bush inauguration. In 2004, Cawley was forced by his board of directors to retire because of his imperious financial demands.

George made no apologies for aligning himself with the richest men in America. He knew that money was the mother’s milk of politics. Addressing an Al Smith Memorial Dinner in New York City, he made sport of his wealthy contributors: “This is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

George had become so accustomed to the luxe life of limousines and private jets that he seemed out of touch with those who had to work for a living and rely on buses and trains. Tom Downs, the former head of Amtrak, remembered calling him when Amtrak was canceling the Texas Eagle, the last passenger rail link between Dallas and Houston. Bush was unaware that such a service even existed.

“When we need to get there, we just take one of Herb’s planes [Herb Kelleher, head of Southwest Airlines], or drive fast,” said the governor. He told Downs to go ahead and drop the service. “No problem.”

Downs then called Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. senator from Texas, to tell her about the cancellation. She asked about Bush’s reaction. Downs phrased the governor’s response diplomatically.

“No, tell me what he really said,” she insisted.

Downs told her.

“That little shit,” said the senator.

George traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on June 12, 1999, to announce his candidacy. “I am proud to be a compassionate conservative,” he said. “I am running so that our party can match a conservative mind with a compassionate heart.” He arrived on a chartered jet he had named
Great Expectations
. A reporter asked why he named his plane after a book by Charles Dickens. George looked at him quizzically.

“It started out as ‘High Expectations’ and I suggested ‘Great Expectations,’” he said.

“But the book?”

“If I read it, I can’t remember it,” said the governor.

When Jim Hightower heard the story, the Texas communicator threw up his hands. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Gore versus Bush is going to be a race between Dull and Dullard.”

In Iowa, George joined a field of eight GOP candidates, most of whom would drop out after he won the caucuses. Staying the course would be Senator John McCain of Arizona, who did not have the money to campaign in Iowa. The underfinanced candidate hoped to beat Bush in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan, and New York before finishing him off in California. A maverick conservative, McCain had beguiled reporters with his refreshing candor, and he excited voters with his honesty and his tough talk about campaign-finance reform. Having been locked in a cage as a prisoner of war for over five years, McCain was revered as a hero. He once joked that he slept more soundly in North Vietnam knowing that George Bush was defending the shores of Texas from invasion. The campaign between the prince and the pauper reflected their contrasting personal styles. Bush flew on luxury jets and carried his own pillow so he would not have to sleep on cheap hotel linen, while McCain traveled on a red, white, and blue bus he had named “The Straight Talk Express.”

Days after George made national news with his formal announcement in Iowa, he again hit the front pages—this time as the brother-in-law of Columba Bush, who had been nabbed by U.S. Customs for failing to declare nineteen thousand dollars’ worth of clothes and jewelry she had bought in Paris. Claiming she spent only five hundred dollars, the wife of Governor Jeb Bush was stopped, searched, and fined forty-one hundred dollars. At her husband’s insistence, she publicly apologized. He said she had lied because she did not want him to know how much she had spent on her five-day shopping trip. “It was a difficult weekend at our house,” said the governor.

Columba was so ashamed that she did not want to accompany her husband and children to Kennebunkport for their annual summer vacation with the Bushes. Frightened of her in-laws, she locked herself in the bedroom at the family compound and would not come out until her sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, knocked on the door and invited her for a walk. “I remember [Jeb’s] thankfulness and appreciation when I took the time to spend with Columba in Maine,” Sharon said.

Jeb later said: “My wife is not a public person. She is uncomfortable with the limelight, which is why I love her. I don’t want a political wife—I want someone who when I get home I can have a normal life with.”

Normalcy had long since disappeared from their household. In 1994 their eldest son, George Prescott Bush, had a fight with a former girlfriend and her father and drove his SUV into their front yard. He was not arrested, because the girlfriend’s parents did not press charges. The next year, Noelle Bush, the governor’s daughter, was arrested for shoplifting and paid a $305 fine. As she became more addicted to drugs, she received twelve traffic tickets in six years; including seven tickets for speeding and three for accidents. In October 2000, security guards in a Tallahassee mall parking lot caught sixteen-year-old John “Jebby” Bush with a seventeen-year-old girl, both naked from the waist down except for Jebby’s socks. A police report on the governor’s son cited “sexual misconduct,” but neither was charged with a crime.

“It could have been worse,” his uncle George joked to an aide. “The girl could’ve been a boy.” A few seconds later he added, “We might’ve picked up some gay votes with that one, huh?”

Such jokes made some people wonder if George was genuinely committed to his ferocious public stands or if his proclamations were simply calculated for political gain. With an estimated 4 million gay voters in the United States, as opposed to 15 million social conservatives, a cynical politician could be expected to support the issues favored by the conservative majority. As governor, George had taken a hard line against homosexuality. He said he supported the state’s law against sodomy as a “symbolic gesture of traditional values.” He opposed hate-crimes legislation that would have protected gays. He also opposed gay adoption and gay marriage. (As President, he came out in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.) Yet he approached the former Texas state representative Glen Maxey, an openly gay Democrat, and tried to draw a line between his politics and his personal feelings.

“He pulled me over really close, almost nose to nose, and said, ‘Glen, I like you as a person. I respect you as a human being. I want you to know that what I say publicly about gay people doesn’t apply to you.’”

Angered by Bush’s opposition to gay adoption, Maxey replied, “Governor, when you say that a gay person is not fit to be an adoptive parent, you’re talking about me.”

During the presidential debates, George pledged that homosexuals “ought to have the same rights” as all other people, but he would not meet with Log Cabin (gay) Republicans. When he was President, his administration decided that homosexuals could be fired from the federal government because of their sexual orientation. In 2004, the Office of Special Counsel ruled that federal employees no longer had recourse if they were fired or demoted simply for being gay.

When Bush proposed the constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex unions, Calvin Trillin picked up his witty pen to write a poem:

GEORGE W. BUSH SPEAKS OUT ON GAY MARRIAGE

He backs an amendment defining the vow
Of marriage as being a guy and his frau,
Lest civilization sink into a slough—
Which he says could happen. It isn’t clear how.

Though he can’t explain it, he needn’t expand.
We saw this with Poppy. We know what’s at hand:
The Jesus battalions demanded this stand.
The yelp of the lap dog is heard in the land.

George’s Andover classmate Conway “Doc” Downing, an African American businessman involved in the gaming industry, smiled as he tried to explain his friend’s paradox. “I’m in a pariah business—Internet gambling,” he said. “When George was governor of Texas, I called Clay Johnson to get Richard Rainwater’s address. Rainwater was the big money behind the Texas Rangers. That’s all I wanted. No help, no recommendation. Just a personal address. I told Clay I wanted to send Rainwater a proposal about gambling. Clay checked with George and called me back. He gave me the address, but said, ‘You didn’t get it from us, because the governor is on the record as opposing gambling.’”

As the 2000 presidential campaign heated up, George won the Iowa caucuses, but going into New Hampshire, he fell behind McCain in the polls. Bush’s pollsters said that one-fourth of his support came from people who liked his mother and father. “It’s powerful,” the New Hampshire attorney Tom Rath told
Newsweek
. “People say the acorn doesn’t fall very far from the tree.” George summoned his family to the state to campaign with him. Jeb arrived and handed out Florida oranges. Barbara appeared in pearls to address the luncheon crowds at Geno’s Chowder and Sandwich Shop. “Georgie will keep his promises,” she said. “Or else his mother will come get him!” The former President stood on stages with his arm wrapped around his eldest son. “You can trust my boy,” he said. “Our son won’t let you down . . . Our boy will work to restore respect to the presidency.”

Voters in the Granite State were not impressed with the “our boy” argument. They saw the Bush family invasion as a desperate Hail Mary pass by a candidate who had taken them for granted, flying home to Austin every weekend to sleep in his own bed. John Adams, the only President whose son aspired to succeed him—and did—never campaigned for John Quincy Adams. The reason, David McCullough, Adams’s biographer, told the columnist Mary McGrory: “It would have been considered ‘unseemly.’” In the Adams family, however, the father’s redemption was not invested in the political success of his son.

Karl Rove, who had never run a national campaign, predicted an easy victory in New Hampshire. When he saw the early exit polls on primary day, he was astounded. His candidate was down fifty points to thirty-two. He went to the governor’s suite.

“We’re going to lose and lose badly,” he said.

“How bad?” asked Bush.

“Real bad,” said Rove. “We’re going to lose by eighteen, nineteen, twenty points. There’s no good news here.”

George did not curse and scream. He sat for a few minutes, watched the Weather Channel, and then drove to a gym in a strip mall and worked out. When he returned, he reassured his troops that no one would be fired, and he braced himself for the call to his father.

“We’re going to be whipped,” he told him. George later recalled that moment as one of his worst. “It’s much harder to be a mother or dad than it is to be the candidate. It was really hard for me to be the son when he was the candidate. And I had to assure them I would be fine. And I will be. I don’t rationalize defeat.”

He gathered his top aides and questioned them closely. “What the hell happened?” he asked. “Why didn’t we know?”

That night, after losing to McCain by eighteen points—49 percent to 31 percent—George called to congratulate his opponent. The senator was as stunned to win as the governor was to lose.

“When he called to concede the primary and offer his congratulations . . . he was quite gracious, and I appreciated it,” said McCain. “I told him that I thought we and the people we loved could be proud of the way we had conducted our campaigns. I meant it . . . We said good-bye as friends. We would soon be friends no more.”

Later Laura Bush spoke to her husband like a schoolteacher scolding a wayward child for not performing up to his potential. “You let him do this to you,” she said. “You let John McCain talk down to you. You’ve got to fight back.”

Laura knew her man. Once he saw the loss as an assault on his manhood, he would jump on his horse and charge. The next day he flew into South Carolina with his youngest brother. As George swept aside the curtain on the plane separating his cabin from the press corps, Marvin said, “The next sound you hear will be the media removing their lips from John McCain’s blank, blank, blank.” The family felt the media, including reporters covering Bush, had been seduced by McCain.

George made it clear that for the next eighteen days he planned to come from the right on every issue. Within hours he proved, as the New Hampshire attorney Tom Rath had observed, that the acorn truly does not fall far from the tree. He emulated his father’s slashing Willie Horton strategy and transformed the South Carolina primary into one of the most vicious campaigns in political history.