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Son hopes to achieve something his father couldn't: a second term

By Robin Abcarian
Los Angeles Times

CHARLES KRUPA / AP George W. Bush, left, then governor of Texas, photographed in 1999 with his father, former President George Bush, in Kennebunkport, Maine.

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When his son George W. Bush landed at Yale 19 years later, he quit baseball after his freshman year, calling himself "mediocre." A hellion fraternity president, he earned average grades and became known for such pranks as tearing down Princeton's goalposts. When his name appeared in The New York Times, he was defending the practice of branding fraternity pledges with red-hot coat hangers.

Same road, very different style.

From Yale to military service, from the Texas oil business to politics, George W. Bush has traveled the same route as his accomplished father, and sometimes seemed diminished by his father's long shadow.

Even when he was elected president, the son's lack of foreign policy experience was shrugged off by many who thought his father's aides and expertise would guide him.

But this week, as he accepts the Republican nomination for a second term, President Bush is clearly more than his father's son. The man who will stand before the nation on Thursday is a product of his father's example, his high expectations and expansive advantages — but also someone who has grated at them enough to establish his own style: openly religious, politically combative and aggressive in his approach to foreign policy and tax cuts.

The distinct path Bush has chosen has also put him in one more competition with his formidable father. If he wins in November, he will have surpassed the career of the first President Bush, who was defeated after a single term.

But if he loses, there will be an irony: Bush would be repeating his father's destiny as a one-term president at least in part because he has worked so hard in the White House to cut a different path.

"Love-hate relationship"

The first President Bush chose to limit his pursuit of Saddam Hussein and famously broke his campaign pledge against new taxes. The current President Bush has cut taxes so consistently that even some allies complain about the resulting budget deficits. His approval ratings, sky high after Sept. 11, 2001, have fallen steeply as the war against Iraq has dragged on.

Doug Wead, an aide in the first Bush White House, who has also been a close friend of the current president, has seen up close how the son was formed by competition with his father.
 
"The word that keeps coming to me is irritation — maybe positive as well as negative — the way a pearl is formed with a piece of sand," he said. "It's very much a love-hate relationship."

The Bush camp vigorously rejects attempts to explain the president, 58, by analyzing his relationship with his 80-year-old father.

"It's a spurious and specious story line," said Bush senior strategist Mary Matalin, who has been a close adviser to father and son. "I think this whole thing is a press creation ... this whole Oedipal nonsense, like life is some kind of Shakespeare," said Matalin. "This is not fiction. This is not a Broadway play."

But others cannot resist. "If you had to write this up as a novel," said Stanley Renshon, a political scientist and psychoanalyst who has written books about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, "someone would say, 'Oh come on. You're being heavy-handed.' "

Though he is not technically a "junior," George W. Bush has been called that for much of his life. The first time he ran for office, in 1978, he spent a good deal of time reminding people that he was neither his father — already a well-known political figure — nor a "junior," going so far as to blow up his birth certificate for reporters to prove that their names were different.

At 15, Bush left Texas for the same Massachusetts boarding school his father had attended, before following his father's route to Yale. In 2001, he would memorably tell a graduating Yale class, "To the C students, I say, you, too, can become president of the United States."

While his father had enlisted in the Navy at age 18 and became a war hero, Bush joined a unit of the Texas Air National Guard that was considered "safe" for young men wishing to avoid combat in Vietnam and learned to fly a kind of jet that was being phased out of combat operations.

"Family clown" cleans up

His father was a casual drinker, but by the time George W. Bush got to Harvard Business School, his uncle, Prescott Bush, has said, he "was becoming a real boozer," according to Peter Schweizer, co-author with his wife, Rochelle, of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty."

In fact, his biography as a young adult is punctuated with unpleasant alcohol-related incidents. In 1972, at 26, he tried to pick a drunken fight with his father after bringing his younger brother home from a party and running over garbage cans on the way into the driveway.

Bush's own four siblings considered him, as his brother Marvin once said, "the family clown." Even Bush once described himself — to the queen of England — as the "black sheep of the family."

It was the second son, the far more serious and accomplished Jeb, who was expected by the family to become president one day.

"He had a pretty underdeveloped adulthood," Renshon said of George W. Bush. "There are a lot of family expectations, especially when you have a father who was a terrific achiever. My take as an analyst is that his sense of being thwarted and never measuring up was one of the reasons he was drawn toward self-medication, his alcohol issue."

Despite earning a Harvard MBA, success eluded Bush. He ran for Congress and lost. He founded an oil company that lost money and was saved only by a merger.

On the verge of 40, his marriage strained by alcohol, Bush became a born-again Christian. He attended a weekly men's Bible study group in Midland, Texas. And then, he abruptly stopped drinking.

Politically, however, the big change in Bush's life came in 1988, when his father ran for president. Bush worked full time on the campaign. For the first time, he not only followed his father's path but also was able to use his own skills and connections to shore up his father's political weaknesses.

As a born-again Christian and uncompromising conservative, Bush helped smooth relations with the newly emerging evangelical movement, which was deeply distrustful of the elder Bush, who had once supported abortion rights and was seen as too willing to compromise on conservative issues.

And where his father preferred a more polite brand of politics, Bush joined with the political strategist Lee Atwater to push for the kind of aggressive campaigning that helped his father overcome a slow start in the Republican primaries.

Still, he was in his family's shadow. Bush mused about running for Texas governor in 1990 but was shot down publicly by his mother, who thought he should not take on a campaign when he had just become managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team.

"Thank you very much," he sniped back at his mother, according to news reports at the time. "You've been giving me advice for 42 years, most of which I haven't taken."

Nonetheless, he would wait four years before running.

Father loses, then son wins

Although it was a heartbreaking moment for the family, the elder Bush's 1992 failure to win a second term as president would pave the son's avenue to freedom.

Despite the family's low expectations for the first-born son who had struggled so hard to be just like his father, Bush would never again have to worry about how his own aspirations would affect his father's career: His father's public life was over.

Leveraging the family name and his newfound credibility as a successful businessman — he had become the public face of the Rangers — Bush was elected Texas governor in 1994 and was easily re-elected in 1998. Few people expected him to win the first time out. His opponent, Ann Richards, was considered unbeatable. His own mother had told him so.

The outcome would irretrievably alter the family dynamic.

Family's new rising star

Jeb also ran for governor — of Florida — in 1994, and lost. The former President Bush campaigned extensively for Jeb; his wife, Barbara, campaigned on behalf of George. On election night, the father's sister, Nancy Ellis, stood next to a victorious George as he took a phone call from his father.

"They chatted for perhaps 10 minutes," Ellis told Schweizer. She said she heard her nephew say, "Why do you feel bad about Jeb? Why don't you feel good about me?"

Then, her nephew hung up the phone, and his disappointment was evident. "It sounds like Dad's only heard that Jeb lost," Bush said, "not that I've won."

The family dynamic changed though, when the implications of George Bush's victory sunk in.

Suddenly, as cousin John Ellis told Schweizer, the prodigal son became the family's political rising star. "As in all things, it's always good to be with the winner," said Ellis. "So they saddled up with ol' George W."

Jeb would win his next campaign for governor of Florida, in 1998, but by that time, his older brother was already laying plans to run for president.

A guide to what not to do

Complaining he'd been "out-countried" in his first, and unsuccessful, political race at 31, he would clear brush in his jeans and cowboy boots. He would make his second home not on the coast of Maine with his family but in dusty West Texas. He would cultivate his twang.

Unlike his parents, he would wear his religion on his sleeve, declaring June 10, 2000, "Jesus Day" in Texas, and even going so far as to tell friends and family on the day of his second gubernatorial inauguration that he thought God wanted him to be president.

After watching his father's defeat for a second term, Bush understood that his father's political strategy could be used as "a reverse playbook," in the words of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, author of "Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk." The first Bush presidency would offer a blueprint on how not to be president; the re-election campaign would be a primer on how not to run for a second term.

On the pages of that playbook are lessons embedded so deeply in the political culture that they can be evoked in shorthand. They are also the very things that may come back to haunt the president in November:

The wimp factor : The father's professed love for pork rinds aside, his shallow Texas roots were never a match for the depth of his feeling for the Maine oceanfront estate at Kennebunkport that is his true emotional home.

The father, often accused of having no fixed ideology, was a supporting player who seemed to shrink in the spotlight of Ronald Reagan, whom he served as vice president. Gail Sheehy once called him a "man of a thousand humiliations." In 1987, Newsweek magazine put the questions about the then-vice president's image on its cover with the headline: "Fighting the Wimp Factor."

No one would ever call the son a wimp. But his opponents have instead called him inflexible and stubborn, unwilling to change course when events suggest that he should.

Read my lips: In 1990, the first President Bush waffled, then flip-flopped on his "no new taxes" pledge. And despite the fact that many economists say the resulting tax increase helped stimulate the economic boom of the '90s, he alienated his conservative base.

"He was a disaster as a president and party leader," wrote neoconservative pundit John Podhoretz, a former Reagan speechwriter, in his new book, "Bush Country." "The son's passionate advocacy of tax cuts isn't just a political lesson well-learned. It is nothing less than a philosophical renunciation of the father's political legacy."

The second President Bush presided over some of the largest tax cuts in history and, even with budget deficits that have some Republicans concerned, has insisted that more tax cuts are in order.

Iraq: The father, who had driven Iraqi leader Saddam out of Kuwait, did not pursue the Iraqi dictator to Baghdad, nor did he step in to help later after encouraging Kurd and Shiite uprisings that were brutally put down by Saddam.

The son, by contrast, has pursued war in Iraq with a single-minded determination and aimed to change the character of the entire region. But the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the controversy over poor post-war planning and the continuing insurgency have deeply divided the electorate.

Still, Bush has said it was his father who made mistakes in Iraq. Earlier this year, after it became clear the struggle in Iraq would be a protracted one, President Bush told the Washington Times that "freedom will prevail so long as the United States and allies don't give the people of Iraq mixed signals, so long as we don't ... do what many Iraqis still suspect might happen, and that is cut and run early, like what happened in '91."

There is no evidence that his father took that as a slap in the face, but some thought it was.

"That made me wince," said Dowd, who has maintained an intermittent e-mail relationship with the father. "I am sure it must have hurt, but the father can focus on the positive, which is that he is proud of his son."

According to people who know them, the two men talk frequently, and their relationship operates on two levels — father to son and ex-president to president.

The elder Bush, famously averse to introspection, prefers communicating emotional thoughts to his son in writing, a practice that has struck some in the family as "almost sadly formal," according to Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio, author of "First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty."

The former president is acutely aware of the pressures of the office and does not offer advice to the current president unless it is sought.