George W. Bush prepares to be inaugurated as the 43rd president of the United States, those who have not studied him closely tend to divide into two camps: the inspired and the appalled. The first group sees him as Prince Hal, a natural leader seasoned by his rapscallion youth; the second sees him as smug and callow, a Richard II attaining power by accident of birth. But whether they are pulling for Hal or scoffing at Richard, they cite the same biography: that Bush was an incurious student and an unsuccessful young man who just 14 years ago was sitting on top of a collapsing oil firm; that he opted out of the ideological and military conflicts of his generation; that he drank too much for many years; that his experience in public service consists of six years in the bully pulpit of a state with a part-time Legislature -- and that he spent two of those years running for president. It is kind of amazing, these people all say, when you think about it.
Bush, who prefers to be underestimated, has not done much to revise that story. When I sat in on a couple of his meetings in Austin just before Christmas, he was still joking with visiting congressmen about how very unlikely a candidate he once was for the Oval Office. That narrative, about an almost accidental president, makes snobs of Bush's critics and so provides the ultimate establishment scion some counterestablishment street cred. At least in its Prince Hal version, the narrative gives Bush something of a compelling back story -- the kind that Americans want in their presidents and one that manages to make a virtue of the notion that the highest hurdle he had to overcome in life was his own fecklessness. The details of that story are true enough. Bush has less government experience than any president since Warren G. Harding, and it took a self-confounding opponent, Bush's own well-placed family members, the entire Republican establishment and five justices of the Supreme Court to heave him over the threshold to the Oval Office. Yet the arc of the story does not do him justice. It elides a basic truth: that Bush has become a methodical, disciplined candidate and officeholder. After eight years of a grand improviser, the voters (or at least those five justices) have chosen a man with a plan. |
