Building a better Bush

Like Father, Like Son

Keeping his personality's ugly side under wraps is only one part of what is required to sustain the Bush persona. To appreciate its essence -- the regular-guy Texan -- you have to understand his father's struggles with his own image, the awkwardness with which the Connecticut preppy attempted to relate to ordinary people, particularly in his adopted state.

The elder Bush made two unsuccessful runs for the Senate, in 1964 and 1970, and both times he got out-Bubba'd, as his opponents convinced voters that Bush was insufficiently Texan, insufficiently Southern, insufficiently down-home, a fancy-pants carpetbagger who was trying to take over on behalf of the Eastern establishment. "Elect a Senator from Texas," said his 1964 opponent, Ralph Yarborough, "and not the Connecticut investment bankers." In 1970 Lloyd Bentsen said much the same thing. It worked, and Bush was beaten both times.

By the time he got to the national stage, George Sr. figured out that the key to dealing with his preppy question was not in convincing people that he wasn't one of the elite, but in redefining the elite itself, just as many conservatives had done before him. His attempts to disown his pedigree -- like proclaiming his love for pork rinds, an assertion greeted with universal guffaws -- fell flat. So he and his team decided to define their 1988 opponent Michael Dukakis, a self-made son of Greek immigrants, as a member of the "Harvard boutique." By the time Election Day came, Americans were sufficiently convinced that Dukakis wasn't one of them, and gave Bush Sr. the White House.

In the 1992 campaign, Bush renewed his attack, the son of a wealthy senator once more deriding an opponent born of poor parents for being part of the "elite," a word peppered throughout his attacks on Bill Clinton. By defining the American "elite" not as an economic one (which would put his family at its very center) but as a cultural or, more specifically, intellectual one, Bush sought to classify his opponents as not only alien from ordinary Americans, but as members of a class with power and influence.

George W. Bush understood well the preppy image his father carried and was eager to stake out a contrast to it. But when he made a premature run for Congress in 1978, George W.'s opponent, Kent Hance, did exactly the same thing Yarborough and Bentsen had done to his father, running radio ads mentioning where Bush went to high school, and deriding Bush for coming from Connecticut. Hance won with more than 53 percent of the vote.

It was the last time anyone would ever out-Bubba George W. Bush. So when he was asked as he was preparing to run for governor what the difference between him and his father was, Bush would say, "He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High School in Midland." In other words, he was a Connecticut Yankee, but I'm a real Texan. In truth, Bush attended San Jacinto Junior High for one year, then went to an elite private school in Houston, followed by spending his high school years at Andover. Bush seldom misses an opportunity to reiterate that he is a real Texan, down to his habit of attributing ordinary American sayings to Texas, as though by speaking them he reveals his provincialism (he once described "show your cards" as "an old Texas expression").

As in many areas, George W. was far more successful in posing as an anti-elitist than his father. Whether George Sr. actually enjoyed pork rinds as he claimed, nobody believed for a second that his snack-food preference made him an ordinary Joe. But the son, with his love for baseball and plain speakin', managed to make most people forget his Brahmin pedigree.

The Liberal "Elite"

Although there may never have been a point in American history in which so much power was held by a party so singularly devoted to the interests of so few, Republicans continue to argue that they speak for the little guy. Of course, this strategy is not a new one; Aristotle noted that "all people receive favorably speeches spoken in their own character and by persons like themselves." It is all the easier to convince people that you are a person like themselves if you can convince them that your opponent is a person quite unlike themselves.

Just as Newt Gingrich once counseled that Democrats should be portrayed as "the enemy of normal Americans," Republicans, from President Bush on down, endlessly assert that only they and those who support them are real Americans. When he travels to the Midwest or South, Bush calls it a "Home to the Heartland Tour."

"Whenever I go home to the heartland," Bush says, "I am reminded of the values that build strong families, strong communities and strong character, the values that make our people unique." The implication, of course, is that the other parts of America are not so strong in those values -- and not so American. When Bush makes this argument, few are so rude as to point out that the man who claimed to be "a uniter, not a divider" has no hesitation in dividing us into the "real" Americans and the not-so-real. And when conservatives say this sort of thing, liberals usually run scared, afraid to stand up and defend what they know to be true, that no one part of America is more American than any other. People who live in Rhode Island or Oregon are no less American than people who live in Oklahoma or Kansas. Nothing about life in Boise is inherently more American than life in New York. No Democrat would dare to suggest that Omaha is not really part of America, but when the Democratic Party elected to hold its 2004 convention in Boston, House Majority Leader Dick Armey quipped, "If I were a Democrat, I suspect I'd feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, America."

Bush unifies the various strains of the right's anti-"elite" ideology: The geographic argument, the argument about the alleged bias of the media, and the anti-intellectual argument. In 1953, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, "Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman," by which he meant that those at the top of the heap use intellectuals as a scapegoat to distract people from the societal inequities that actually affect their lives: those of wealth and power. Intellectuals are posited as both sinister and powerful, conspiratorially undermining the values of ordinary people.

Next Page: Bush on fundraising: "Send a letter to your family's Christmas card list. I just did and I got $350,000!"

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