He started out shakily, he almost dropped the ball, he fumbled, he blinked, he overspent, he was a verbal disaster when discussing foreign policy. And he almost lost it, too. What must have been most painful and poignant to Al Gore, even as he finally conceded gracefully and manfully, is that he had won far more "popular" votes (300,000 over Bush nationwide) but nonetheless lost the White House owing to the peculiar manner the Founding Fathers decreed Americans should elect their President.
But this is what makes politics "the art of the possible", and, incongruously, the ability to lose by a hair and yet cheer as the winner goes by is what makes Americans strong. George W. Bush of Texas, now President-elect, will have a difficult time of it in his effort to bind up the nation’s political wounds and move "unity" and "reconciliation" and the banishment of "rancor and recrimination" from the realm of rhetoric to reality. But do this he must. Yet, judging from his character – and, more vitally, the character of the family that molded him – he can and will do it.
From the day this writer heard Vice President Gore speak to our International Press Institute delegates in Houston half a year ago, I must admit I had decided that Bush would probably be better for Americans than Gore. This is not to say that Mr. Gore would have been wrong for the job, but there was something phoney about him, even in his squeaky-clean "image", the very public seven-second kiss (on TV) he had bestowed on his pretty wife Tipper, in his preachy but I’m-trying-to-be-folksy method of speech delivery. Perhaps I wrong him, but he polished up his Boy Scout "Eagle" badge too assiduously to convince me that deep down, beneath that starched white shirt, there beats a human heart.
Bush, on the other hand, seemed so clumsy and at times corny, that you had the feeling that here was a genuine individual, and what you saw was what you got. I may be eating my words a few months from now, but I felt for months that Bush would be a good President for Americans (not necessarily for Filipinos and the rest of the world), and what Americans need most – divided and quarrelsome the way they are – is a good, solid President who’s not worried about what they’re saying about him in Beijing or whether the fashion gurus in Paris think he’s cute.
And now, from Deep in the Heart of Texas but originally from Connecticut (where grandpa Prescott Bush was Senator) and New York City (where grandma Dorthy Walker’s father had founded a powerful Wall Street investment house and been a political adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt) as well as Washington, DC (where dad had been President), George W. is Top Dog of the United States of America.
George W. speaks as proudly of the "defeats" suffered by him and his family as he does about their triumphs. After he defeated the nationally-prominent Texas Governor Ann Richards (a Democrat) he narrated years later, "a treasured picture from my first inauguration shows Mother and Dad and the rest of my family watching as I took my oath of office. Dad was wiping a tear from his face, Jeb was standing behind him in the second row, looking pensive, no doubt thinking of what might have been. He was the brother who was supposed to have won in November of 1994, the Bush brother given the better shot at defeating Florida Governor Lawton Chiles than I had to upset popular incumbent Texas Governor Ann Richards. But it had not worked out that way, and Dad spoke for the whole family on election night when he told the press, ‘Our heads are in Texas, but our hearts are in Florida."
Old dad was not to know that, half a decade later, the Florida vote was to become the most crucial ballot in the world for George W. Bush.
In his moving autobiography, A Charge To Keep (William Morrow & Company, Inc., New York, 1999), George remarked: "I was so proud of my younger brother. Jeb hadn’t let defeat deter him; in fact, he said it had made him a better man. He displayed no hint of bitterness, despite allegations that campaign shenanigans had unfairly cost him votes. He was that hardest thing to be, gracious in defeat. After the election, he had taken stock of his life, spent more time with his family converted to Catholicism, started a charter school in inner-city Miami, and kept working, reaching out, preparing for next time."
And, in truth, Jeb was elected Florida Governor the next time.
George recalled that he, too, had lost his race for Congress in 1978. "Defeat humbles you," he said. "You work, you dream, you hope the people see it your way, then suddenly it’s over and they did not . . . Yet if you believe in the wisdom of the voters, you get over the disappointment, accept the verdict, and move on. My father and mother who taught us so many of life’s most important lessons, modeled that for us, too, in 1992."
When George W. Bush Sr. lost the Presidency to Bill Clinton, George W. remembers, "I watched as my dad’s approval ratings plummeted from a record-shattering high of 92 percent just after Operation Desert Storm (the Gulf War) to only 38 percent when the American people voted in November." Towards the end, when it became painfully apparent President Bush Sr. was falling behind, George W. accompanied dad on the plane in what was to be his last campaign journey. "Just before the last stop," he wrote afterwards, "Dad, Mary Matalin (ever the loyal soldier), the Oak Ridge Boys and I gathered in Dad’s cabin on ‘Air Force One’. At Dad’s request, the Oaks sang ‘Amazing Grace.’ It was a touching moment; Mary and I wiped tears from our eyes as we both sensed the impending defeat."
The morning after the election-day defeat, George W. recalls, "Mother, in her usual unflappable way, said, ‘Well, now, that’s behind us. It’s time to move on."
I came to appreciate Bush better after he was no longer President, when I heard him interviewed on Larry King Live. Later, I read a wonderful book, entitled All The Best (Scribner, 1999) in which his letters had been compiled. The compilation began with the letters the 18-year old George wrote his parents during World War II, his love letters to his future wife Barbara when he was a Navy combat pilot in the Pacific, the missives he penned during his career in the oil business, his two terms in congress, his ambassadorship to the United Nations, his term as an envoy to Beijing, his stint as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (yes, the CIA), his vice presidency, his presidency. From those pages, a very human, warm-hearted, patriotic and idealistic Bush emerged. He has transmitted these traits, quite obviously, to his children.
His finest letter is towards the end of that 630-page volume – addressed to his old friend Hugh Sidey of TIME magazine.
It was written on November 3, 1998, just hours before the results in Florida came in to tell him whether son Jeb had been elected Governor on his second try.
"How does it feel?" Bush asks Hugh in his missive, "Well, I am nervous and I am proud . . . Tomorrow I might well be the Dad of the Governors of the second and fourth largest states in the union. But there will be no feeling of personal vindication, no feeling of anything other than pride in two honest boys, who, for the right reasons, want to serve – who fought the good fight and won. People will call to congratulate us, but they will never begin to know the true depth of my feeling towards my sons. It will be what life is really all about for me right now. Six years ago I was President of the United States of America. Tonight, maybe, the father of two governors. How great it is!"
Good for you, George! This morning you are the father of the new President of the United States.
George W. Bush still quotes fondly from his brother Jeb’s inaugural speech as Florida Governor in 1998: "Jeb spoke eloquently of faith, family, and friends. ‘It is here that most of life’s principles are forged,’ he said, ‘Loyalty, empathy, generosity, and caring are cords of a rope that bind us together into something far stronger than we can ever be individually."
Don’t you think a family that thinks this way deserves a crack at renewed leadership?
In Texas, George W. once remarked: "Children in schools speak nearly sixty-three different languages in Houston, fifty-seven different languages in Dallas. Diversity is something to celebrate, not shrink from . . ."
"Texas is a place where people hold fast to basic values," the incoming Chief Executive noted in his autobiography. "Give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wages; don’t lie, cheat or steal; respect others, respect their property, and respect their opinions. And Texas is a place where most people know they can improve their lives through hard work and education." In another section, he declared: "We’re all made in the image of God. We’re all equal in God’s eyes . . . The real answer to improving people’s lives is found in the hearts of decent, caring people who have heard the call to love their neighbors as they would like to be loved themselves."
If he really means those words (politicians can be too glib), then George W. Bush won’t merely be a good President. He’ll be, far better than that, a good man.