W.'s interest in genuine policy-making seems pretty much to have vanished after this one feint at school reform. Since then, he has not once deviated from his earlier profile as "a CEO's wet dream," in Ivins and Dubose's colorful formulation. In addition to pushing his doomed education program, Bush campaigned against incumbent Ann Richards in 1994 on a platform of cracking down on juvenile crime, welfare reform and "tort reform." The welfare and kid crime crusades -- with all their alarmist scolding and scare-mongering on the stump -- appeased the Texas GOP's culture warriors on the Christian right. But it was the tort campaign -- which in plain English made it all but impossible for indigent plaintiffs to sue large corporate defendants and malpractice defendants in the health and insurance industries -- that really plumped Dubya's campaign coffers, to the tune of nearly $1 million in the '94 race.

Meanwhile, in environmental matters, Bush managed the impressive trick of making Texas -- already the No. 1 state in the nation in most categories of air and water pollution -- into a yet more obliging playground of deregulation for the big polluters in the state's oil, chemical and agricultural industries. Flexing one of his only appointive muscles, Bush dispatched all three Richards-appointed members of the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (or, as it is known in the colorful argot of the Lone Star political set, "Trainwreck").

The dismissed Richards appointees were experienced environmental lawyers and regulators; under Bush, Trainwreck was composed of a former director of the Texas Farm Bureau (a lobby and insurance outfit that invests heavily in the chemical industry); a former Monsanto executive and chief lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council; and a voluble, mustachioed evangelical attorney known among his former Texas Senate colleagues as "the skinny Hitler." The Bush-appointed Trainwreck team promptly set about dismantling the state's just-instituted "right to know" enforcement regime governing farm workers' exposure to hazardous pesticides.

It was a bit, well, like turning over administration of the state's welfare system to pork-starved defense contractors and instituting profit incentives to decrease enrollments -- another Bush gambit that the Clinton administration smote down in a rare display of backbone. But a far more gruesome Bush-sponsored welfare initiative speaks volumes about the sort of political imperatives that can pass unremarked under the broad ambit of "compassionate conservatism." In 1999, Bush moved to limit eligibility for state funding under the federal Children's Health Initiative Program. With 1.4 million uninsured kids, Texas is second only to California in this depressing social indicator; the standards Bush urged on the state would have denied coverage to 200,000 children.

Why? Because, as it turns out, the federal CHIP program funnels children from families who earn too little to qualify under its guidelines into the Medicaid program, where they get free health insurance. In other words, a broader CHIP program in Texas would have created "Medicaid spillover" -- a bureaucratic term of art that means (in the campaign patois that is Bush's native tongue): If too many poor kids get government health insurance in Texas, other contenders for the presidency will claim that the welfare rolls increased on your watch.

Fortunately, the Democratic-controlled state Legislature overrode Bush's plan -- another reason to be grateful for the feeble powers of the Texas governorship. But such case studies should remind us, for all the chatter about "prosperity with a purpose" and the occasional dramatic pause to intone a talking point in Spanish, that W. was initiated into the national political campaign scene as an understudy of Lee Atwater, head of the 1988 presidential run of Bush the Elder, and the W.-ish Southern frat boy who introduced Willie Horton, "the L-word" and "card-carrying member of the ACLU" into the nation's sad political lexicon.

"Shrub" furnishes many other scarifying details from the little-consulted annals of Texas politics in the W. years, from the lurid (W.'s execution- and incarceration-happy approach to law enforcement) to the merely sad (his bulldog insistence on ever greater quantities of "tort reform" to appease ever larger campaign donors). True, it does overindulge Ivins' weakness for ostentatiously down-home prose (continually designating the most powerful force in Texas politics with the folksy term "bidness" and even appending an explanatory footnote on the locution; not to mention repeating at every opportunity the Southern bromide "you got to dance with them what brung you," which also happens to be the title of one of Ivins' books).

But such "Hee-Haw"-style asides don't seriously detract from the useful political education to be had in "Shrub." Of course, John McCain has given us surprising new grounds to hope that GOP voters could render the need for such self-instruction obsolete. Yet $70 million (and a dynastic name and a polished stump delivery and a patrician smirk) goes a long way. It's best in the meantime to urge "Shrub" on concerned citizens of any party affiliation, lest we find ourselves stuck at the dance with a singularly callous and store-bought golfing partner.

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