Like father, like son. The governor of the nation’s second largest state is performing the political equivalent of a sky dive, staking his re-election next year–and a potential run for the White House in 2000–on a bid to reform Texas’s tax laws. The heir to “Read my lips” wants to substitute higher state taxes on business for the local property taxes that now fund public schools. “I’m betting all my political capital on this,” George W. Bush declares–enthusiastically. The GOP right is grumbling, Democrats are suspicious, corporate lobbyists could overwhelm him. There are no Golden Knights to help pull his cord. But Austin’s smart money says Bush will land safely. “He’ll either have a tax-reform bill he can brag about or a theme he can run on,” says Austin consultant Paul Begala. “We’re talking real talent.” Begala should know: he helped run Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign.
Texas matters more than ever, and not just because of its rising son. Its economy–the 11th largest in the world–is booming as laptop cowboys focus on software, airlines and marketing rather than on oil, gas and timber. The state’s myriad problems are the nation’s in bold relief: waves of illegal immigrants, extreme poverty amid the plenty, unresolved questions about how to help minorities without an Anglo revolt. The Texas answer, Bush thinks, is destined to become America’s: a “responsible society” built on tough individualism and Bible belt solidity. He may be fight. In the post-big-government era, hard work, volunteerism and swift punishment sound deeply mainstream.
Americans claim to despise aristocracy, but they love dynasties-and stories of a wayward son’s return. The Bush saga has it all. After years of being dismissed as a footloose lightweight, George W., now 50, is emerging from his father’s shadow. Turns out he’s a late bloomer, but a well-bred one, mixing his father’s glandular drive and his mother’s disarming candor. Approval ratings are high, the local media are impressed. He’s mollified the right, Texas style: with tough stands against gun control and teen pregnancy and in favor of prayer and prison work gangs. More important, even Democrats tend to view him as an almost apolitical straight shooter. “You know where you stand with him,” says Pete Laney, speaker of the Texas House.
Harried dad: In contrast to his father, he’s been able to sell himself as a Texas Everyman. It’s not just that he’s lived in Midland, Houston, Dallas and Austin, or that he was front man for the Texas Rangers baseball team. It’s his immediate family. In 1977 he married Laura Welch, a devout west Texas school librarian. Behind the scenes, she rules. Her husband is a typical harried dad, humbled by twin 15-year-old daughters, Jenna and Barbara. To celebrate his inauguration in 1994, they proposed to dye their hair flaming red. The answer was no. They asked to attend public high school. He reluctantly agreed. As he left the mansion recently-on his way to yet another nighttime event-they critiqued his attire. “Day-ud!” said Jenna. “You’re not really wearing that windbreaker, are you? It’s so dorky!”
Bush knows-but doesn’t dare say-that if he’s up to the task of Texas (and teenagers), he’ll have a chance to become the first man since John Quincy Adams to follow his father to the White House. History helps: three of the last four presidents (all but Dad) were former governors. The sun belt has produced every elected president since 1964, and two (LBJ and Dad) called Texas home.
To take the next step, Bush will have to explain not only his governing record but his own history. Though he now condemns the free-flowing culture of the 1960s as a “failure,” he readily admits that he spent some “nomadic years” after college “living kind of loose.” The prayerful sobriety, and happy marriage, came later. And though he now touts the virtues of sturdy self-reliance, it’s also true that for decades he’s benefited, in business and politics, from his dad’s connections and prominence.
George W. learned early to be charming: a pleaser eager to keep others from crying. When he was 7, his sister, g-year-old Robin, died of leukemia. Georgie’s response was to make people laugh. At a football game, he announced that he wished he were Robin. His father stiffened and asked why. “I bet she can see the game better from up there than we can here,” he said. He was solicitous of his mother’s pain; she clung to him and his baby brother, Jeb. Once when a friend invited him over, Georgie refused. He couldn’t leave Mom. She overheard. “I realized I was too much of a burden for a little 7-year-old boy to carry,” Barbara Bush later wrote.
George W. is at home on the public stage in the way his father never was. Growing up in Midland, he was far removed from his father’s chauffeur-driven childhood in Connecticut: the elder Bush went to Greenwich Country Day, his son to San Jacinto Junior High. He was always tagged with nicknames–Georgie, Bombastic Bushkin, Junior, George W., W.–because “George Bush” was taken. So he applies tags to everyone, and lives in what sounds like a towel-snapping, frat-house world. Gov. John Engler of Michigan is “Engie.” Travel aide Israel Hernandez is just “Izzy.”
The former president forged ties to the common folk by serving in World War II. His son did the same in the culture war at home. Politically, he was out of step. When he arrived at Yale in the fall of 1964, it wasn’t cool to be the son of a Republican. When the news arrived that his father had lost a Texas Senate race to a Democratic liberal, at least one faculty member–William Sloane Coffin–professed delight. As the campus turned left, Bush stuck with the apolitical foamheads in the DKE house. He was tapped for Skull and Bones, as his father had been, and gladly accepted.
As graduation loomed and the Vietnam War raged, he had choices-and they didn’t include a Rhodes scholarship. “Canada or the draft,” he says. Bush managed to enlist in an Air National Guard unit in Houston. The sons of many prominent men were in the squad, and at the time his father was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. But there is no evidence that Bush was shown any special favoritism, and the work was dangerous enough. Even in Texas, flying F-102s was no picnic.
These were his wandering years, from 1968 to 1973. There was flight school in Valdosta, Ga.; work on a losing GOP Senate campaign in Alabama; an excruciating year as an agricultural-supplies salesman in Houston; a year as a youth adviser in a Houston program that used pro athletes to “mentor” inner-city kids. He roared around in his Triumph, partied hard in his apartment complex. He drank a lot, he admits, but won’t directly say whether he used marijuana or other illegal drugs. “I made a lot of mistakes in the past; I’m just not going to itemize them,” he says. “We’ve been handed the mantle of responsibility for our country, and we’ve just got to admit that certain things were wrong. The culture of my generation–flit feels good do it, and be sure to blame someone else–failed.”
Inside track: After two years of “re-education” at Harvard Business School, Bush finally set out on his own-at the age of 28. He drove his Cutlass to Midland, just as his father had driven a Studebaker a generation earlier. He had friends, and his father’s friends, in what was then a booming oil business. He never had to declare bankruptcy through subsequent busts–an achievement in Texas. He kept the books well enough. There was never any legal trouble. But he had an inside track, and is now worth at least $4 million.
His first mentor, a geologist named Paul Rea, was a friend of friends in Midland. One of George W.’s original oil-drilling investors was a buddy of Jim Baker’s. Rea later put Bush in touch with two Cincinnati businessmen, who bought in to save him. They, in turn, were bought out by a bottom-feeding company whose board was impressed by Bush’s holdings–and by the fact that he was the then vice president’s son.
Then, baseball. The Cincinnatians had ties to the Reds, and helped get Bush involved in the purchase of the Texas Rangers in 1989. The deal might have failed without the intervention of another ally: Peter Ueberroth, the savvy Republican who was commissioner of baseball at the time. Dad, at the time, was president. Under his contract as a general managing partner of the Rangers, Bush’s original $600,000 investment could eventually be worth $10 million.
Bible study: The life George W. launched in Midland was more important for another reason. Three months after meeting Laura, he married her. Under her tutelage he learned to study the Bible and even talk about Jesus in public-something his Episcopal parents rarely did. Now he’s a Billy Graham fan. “He was ready to be rescued,” Laura says with a smile. In 1986, just after his 40th birthday, he quit drinking cold turkey after waking up with a hangover at the Broadmoor in Colorado.
Now he’s a disciplined man. His engine still idles fast, but his stimulant is human contact, his calming agent exercise. “People in Texas love their governor!” he declares. And he loves to be loved. At a University of Texas basketball game he sits at the scorer’s table, waving to everyone who passes by, or who waves at him from the stands. He knows the team in detail; he’s a guy with an open shirt and a big bucket of popcorn who keeps up with the scoring averages. Pols troop by to pay respects. Bush makes pungent cracks about each-as soon as they’re out of earshot. “That guy is trying to kiss my butt now,” he says of one. “But he’s not on our side, and I know it.” He nods to a man in a fancy suit. “Biggest lobbyist in town,” he says. “Gonna try to screw me on the tax bill.” He waves heartily.
He’s learned a lot from his father’s ups and downs, and his own. Among the lessons: ideas matter, especially kitchen-table issues; always have a big agenda; never rest on your laurels; seize the tax issue before it seizes you. Timing is all; patience is required. “I’m not shackled by ambition,” he says. If he fails he’ll try something else. But he smiles when reminded of a stroll he took on a chilly morning in January 1989. It was along an eerily empty Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. He was inspecting the route for his father’s Inaugural parade. He was alone, and there was a swagger in his step. He was proud of his dad-and perhaps daydreaming a bit.
