But down in Austin last week, it was nothing but blue skies: eerily blue. Highly credentialed experts shuttled in to give Bush yet another tutorial at the governor’s mansion, this one on defense issues. Over at the Four Seasons, venture capitalists gathered to lavish cash on Texas’s newest high-tech start-ups and to see Bush. In the state capitol, Democrats were giving Bush a hard time over money–they want more for teachers’ pay, less for tax cuts–but most wished him well. “He’s like family,” said one. Outside, on the capitol’s steps, Bush preached a sermon in the noon sun on the National Day of Prayer. He looked tanned and rested–and ready as he’d ever be.
Enjoy the sun while you can, Governor. After months of pursuing his stay-at-home, low-profile campaign, Bush is about to step into the maelstrom. There’s rarely been such a dramatic make-or-break situation in American politics. Never has so much been expected from someone so essentially untested on the national stage. If Bush were a movie, he’d be the new “Star Wars”: the closely guarded, breathlessly anticipated next episode in a multigenerational saga of family destiny. The buzz on Bush remains strong: in the NEWSWEEK Poll he is preferred by 46 percent of Republican voters, nearly three times the strength of his nearest rival, and he trounces Gore (54-36) in the all-Ivy finals.
But Bush and his handlers know they are sitting atop a rocket about to blast off–to where they aren’t quite sure. Since last year their man has rarely been out of the state. But after the legislature ends this month–with $2 billion in tax cuts, they hope–he will venture to Iowa and New Hampshire, and perhaps to South Carolina, Florida and California, on his first campaign swing. Overnight, the Bush campaign will be thrust into a feeding frenzy of general-election intensity: a press plane with a full load of skeptics aboard. “It’s going to be wild,” said a top aide.
The Bushies have a flight plan that they hope will get their man into orbit–and into the White House–without exploding in midair, either on the first trip or later. They’re not trying to lower expectations. If anything, they’re raising them. Bush has virtually cornered the market on endorsements. In private meetings, friends and allies say, he exudes a confident mix of Yankee noblesse and Texas bravado, saying almost fatalistically that he is resigned to victory or defeat.
But timing, he knows from his father’s experience, is crucial. The Bush clan wants to control the pace of the campaign–which means to slow it down. So though Bush will hit the road this summer, these trips will be portrayed as “get acquainted” sessions in which he will expound generally on his background and beliefs. He may not announce his formal candidacy until after Labor Day. That would give him an excuse, should he choose to take it, of not participating in the Iowa straw poll next August in Ames–the kind of grass-roots-for-hire event that gives front runners the willies. There’s a debate in the Bush camp about what to do, but a narrow consensus seems to be leaning against taking part.
Beyond timing and endorsements, the Bushies have a theory of history for a kind of guidance system. It was developed by Bush campaign manager Karl Rove. A century ago, he says, the GOP was adrift, its original reasons for being–to abolish slavery and win the war for the industrial North–all but forgotten. A new generation of Republican organizers, led by William McKinley and later Theodore Roosevelt, revived the party in an era of dizzying growth and immigration by stressing not only the power of capitalism but the duty of new entrepreneurs to spread the benefits of the world they made. Now, according to Rove, Bush’s agenda of “prosperity with a purpose” aims to do the same thing: revive the GOP on a theme of the government’s moral role in spreading the benefits of economic growth. “The parallels are amazing,” said Rove. In Austin, it doesn’t feel so much like a campaign as a government-in-waiting. Now all Bush has to do is win the campaign.
