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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (1126)	7/19/1999 11:45:00 AM
From: j g cordes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

"sat next to showboat.." Probably, though there's nothing wrong with being a showboat if you've got the goods to back it up. Heck, George Bush is jumping from planes!

To: Neocon who wrote (1126)	7/19/1999 12:05:00 PM
From: Achilles	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

On Bush's 'skeletons'. For what it's worth, while in Edmonton Canada over the weekend, I read in a Canadian paper (which my hosts assure me is a right-wing paper) the following. The article implied that Bush would be Gore's favored opponent. I have no idea about the specific politics of the writer or the correctness of the 'allegations'. <Start> George W. Bush, eldest son of former president George H. W. Bush, will do his best to exploit those weaknesses and overcome his own. He has achieved a legislative record in Texas of tax cuts, higher student reading scores and tort-liability reforms only through a series of compromises with Democratic legislators in Austin. He is vulnerable on the left as a pro-gun, anti-choice opponent of environmental reform, and on the right for his self-depiction as a "compassionate conservative," which G.O.P. hardliners fear could translate into more subsidized daycare spaces and higher spending on education for poor children. When President Bush succumbed to a similar mongrelized approach to governance, Pat Buchanan hit "King George" hard in the 1992 G.O.P. primaries. The perennial Republican mischief-maker, along with Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle and John McCain, will be hitting "Prince George" just as hard over George W. Bush's suspect credentials as a true conservative. Bush will offer himself as the product of a gritty West Texas childhood, with only blurry recollections of later sojourns at Phillips Academy, Yale and Harvard, where he earned an MBA. The latter proved of little value, apparently, in the succession of obscure, profitless oil ventures in Texas that occupied Bush until he gained part ownership of baseball's Texas Rangers in 1989. Bush makes no secret of how those ventures were bankrolled by friends of his famous father, or that his backers saw obvious advantage in bankrolling the son of a vice-president and president. No doubt, Bush's handlers will somehow fashion an image of self-reliant political outsider from this mosaic. FDR, the epochal populist, drew his first and last breaths as a Hudson Valley aristocrat, after all. But Bush will be pressed to offer more credible explanations than in the past for the frequent embarrassments that have arisen from his dealings with friends and wannabe friends of his father. Dems are eager to have someone pay for the Whitewater non-scandal. It might as well be Bush, who at a time of collapsing oil prices in 1982 was paid an absurdly rich price for his tiny stake in a failed oil producer by a mysterious Panamanian outfit with ties to James Baker, a senior advisor. Then there's the strange good fortune of another Bush venture that had no experience in offshore oil drilling, but nonetheless in 1990 was granted an offshore oil-drilling contract by the government of Bahrain, which just then was trying to improve its relations with the Bush administration. It was also in 1990 that Bush realized a fat profit on his sale of shares in that same outfit, just weeks before it reported a staggering loss. For good measure, he failed to report that transaction to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The S.E.C. accepted George W.'s explanation that his negligence arose only from a sort of boyish ineptitude. From the moment of his father's White House victory in 1988, George W. began plotting his gubernatorial triumph in Texas. It would be a six-year project, given that Bush lacked a feel for political issues in the Lone Star state, where he was simply a president's son who had come acropper in the oilpatch. By a happy stroke, George W.'s budding membership in the fraternity of major-league baseball owners -- again secured through friends of Bush Sr. -- provided the solution. A spectacular new stadium for the Texas Rangers was, finally, "the one big thing" he could use to attract voter attention. More recently, the self-destruction of the G.O.P.'s national leadership has spawned the idea of a Bush II presidency. The notion appears to have begun not with Bush, but with his 31 fellow Republican governors, who think their telegenic peer can rescue the national G.O.P. from zealots. If Bush lacks policy heft, that might just make him an antidote to the over-endowment of ideology that crippled Newt Gingrich and his successors. Never mind that Bush's sole achievement in public life prior to 1994 was getting taxpayers to finance a new playground for the ballclub from which he drew his salary. Or that since 1994, the political agenda in Texas has been set largely by Democrats. Bush still lacks a feel for issues. He criticizes racial preferences in hiring while signing laws that enforce such quotas in Texas schools. He tells environmental groups he agrees with Gore that global warming has indeed been proven, only to say later in private that he still has doubts. He needs to be coached out of talking in public about "Grecians" and "Kosovians." In the governors' rush to enlist Bush there is a thudding echo of a tragic-comic scene in Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, in which a monied cabal recruits an empty-headed pretty boy to dethrone a worthy but wearied mayor. Maybe the media will take the high road, seeking atonement for past scandal-mongering. It has made such pledges before, but this time it might actually choose not to retail stories about Bush's petulance when denied admission to the presidential enclosure at the Astrodome, sparking more than one shouting match with Secret Service agents. Or about the drinking binges back in the days when George W. was, as one friend put it, "on the road to nowhere at age 40." Or about why he served in the Texas Air National Guard instead of in Vietnam. And so on. But it's too much to expect Gore will be so kind. <end>