Defining George W. Bush (Boston Globe Interpretation)

tanding next to British prime minister Tony Blair at a public appearance in Belfast last month, President Bush should have been a vision of serenity. The war in Iraq was going superbly; just 19 days had passed, and already coalition troops were inside Baghdad, on the verge of giving him his second military victory as president. The hunt was on for chemical weapons, the original argument for going to war. And Bush, with his best ally by his side, was crossing new frontiers as a world leader, committing to talks on peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

But Bush showed little sign of inner contentment. As reporters challenged him about plans for postwar Iraq, he grew impatient, even indignant. His legs shifting behind the lectern, he gestured menacingly as if to choke an enemy, demonstrating the grip Saddam Hussein once had on Iraq. When an American correspondent asked him to clarify what role he envisioned for the United Nations in rebuilding the country – the question on everyone's mind that day – Bush sounded incredulous.

"We have said all along there needs to be a role for the United Nations," Bush said, clearly irritated. "We will keep repeating it. And evidently there's some skepticism here in Europe about whether or not I mean what I say. Saddam Hussein clearly knows I mean what I say."

Seconds later, Bush abruptly cut off questioning, a privilege usually assumed by the summit host.

Such combativeness from Bush has become increasingly routine, especially in dealing with reporters or anyone else who dares challenge his authority. Indeed, for a president who is closely stage-managed and prides himself on discipline, George W. Bush has let his temper flare publicly an unusual number of times. He has glared at the cameras, threatened his adversaries, even joked about running a dictatorship. The outbursts, although occasional, have fed the cowboy caricature that sums up why a large number of people around the world are so furious with his administration and, by extension, the United States.

Yet Bush's ire is more than an interesting impulse. It reflects a driving force behind his presidency. Bush detests being challenged, whether by reporters or political leaders. He is unyielding in his convictions, to the exclusion of all else. He is principled. But he is also stubborn, a trait that has become a guiding force of his governing style, a management tool, and perhaps even a new chapter in American history.

In a certain sense, it is this bold rigidity that best explains his first two years in office, which have seen an amazing string of triumphs few could have predicted when he won the election. From the $1.3 trillion tax cut to the midterm elections to the war in Iraq, Bush has repeatedly pushed all his chips into the middle of the poker table and dared his opponents to challenge him. And repeatedly, he has won.

Ask his critics to explain how Bush operates, and the phrase they come up with most often is "my way or the highway," bullyish words it is possible to imagine Bush using himself. White House advisers delicately call it leadership, but there is a proud feeling in the corridors of the West Wing that Bush has accomplished more of his agenda with his swagger and determination than Bill Clinton ever did by being nice.

Vice President Dick Cheney elaborated on it at length earlier this year, saying in an NBC television interview that "the notion that the president is a cowboy – I don't know, is a Westerner – I think that's not necessarily a bad idea. I think the fact of the matter is he cuts to the chase. He is very direct, and I find that very refreshing.

"Oftentimes," Cheney continued, "you can get so tangled up in the nuance and the fine points of diplomacy of dealing with these kind of issues, engage in a large debate. But the people who make things happen, the leaders who set the world, if you will, on a new course, deal effectively with these kinds of threats that we've never been faced with before, will be somebody exactly like President Bush. I think he's exactly what the circumstances require."

cover story about then vice president George H. W. Bush under the headline "Bush Battles the Wimp Factor." The criticism deeply stung the elder Bush, who has been known to mention it to Newsweek staffers in the years since, but it also taught his son a lesson. Current advisers to President Bush have carefully studied his father's political playbook, on everything from taxes to foreign policy, and more or less done the opposite. No one would accuse this President Bush of being a wimp – or of lacking the "vision thing," the other charge that dogged the 41st president.

To explain George W. Bush as the antithesis of his father is tempting, but it overlooks an even likelier model for his behavior – his mother. Three years before the elder Bush's backbone was questioned, Barbara Bush stunned the political world with a daring insult to her husband's Democratic rival for the vice presidency, Geraldine Ferraro. "I can't say it, but it rhymes with rich," Barbara Bush said of Ferraro. She later apologized and insisted she had meant Ferraro was a witch, not the profanity everyone had assumed.

That sort of biting invective and sarcasm show up in the current president time and again – as do the former first lady's impatience, contempt for the media, and ferocity. Before friendly audiences, Bush mentions his mother far more than his father, often joking that he is still obeying her orders.

"Certainly almost everybody who knows him well knows his personality is much closer to his mother's than to his father's," says Norman Ornstein, scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Author Richard Ben Cramer, describing a temper tantrum George W. Bush threw during the 1988 presidential race when he found he was not seated with his father at a baseball game, wrote that Bush had "all the old man's high spirits, but none of his taste for accommodation."

"In fact, he was more like [Barbara] the way he called a spade a spade. But it wasn't so easy for him to do it in the background, the way she'd done it all these years," Cramer wrote in his classic account of the campaign, What It Takes.

But if those traits were readily apparent in Bush during his freewheeling early years – when, among other things, he reportedly yelled at Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt in a Dallas restaurant, calling him a "son of a bitch" for predicting in print that Jack Kemp would win the Republican presidential nomination instead of George H. W. Bush – his public outbursts subsided somewhat after he stopped drinking at age 40, when he underwent a religious rebirth, and rarely surfaced during his time as Texas governor. Indeed, upon entering politics in 1994, Bush seemed to assume a new persona altogether: the living embodiment of "compassionate conservatism," an ideology whose very name suggests docility and reasoned compromise.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference between Bush then and now is the tale of Bob Bullock, the powerful Democratic lieutenant governor whom Bush befriended during his time as governor. Bush himself spun the narrative of their bipartisan cooperation endlessly on the campaign trail in 2000, telling audiences about his successful efforts to work with Bullock. The lieutenant governor had even endorsed Bush when he ran for a second term. Voters from Bangor to Seattle who had never thought twice about Texas politics heard about Bullock; the riff became such a staple of the Bush stump speech that even on the night the election was decided, December 13, 2000, he cited Bullock in his acceptance speech.

"I cannot help but think of our mutual friend, the former Democrat lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock," Bush said from the Texas Capitol in his first remarks as president-elect. "His love for Texas and his ability to work in a bipartisan way continue to be a model for all of us. The spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall is what is needed in Washington, D.C."

People who observed Bush as governor have watched his transformation since with amazement – although there are different views of how and why he has evolved over the last 2 years in Washington. Bruce Buchanan, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who has studied the Bush family political dynasty for decades, says, "Really, it's always been `my way or the highway'; it just wasn't talked about or written about as much as his impatience was" when Bush was governor.

"People always talked about how impatient he was with time-wasters and dissenters and opponents who didn't follow the rules, but there wasn't much difficulty for him to find common ground," Buchanan says. "Here in Texas, building a consensus was easy, because everybody was a centrist conservative, both Democrats and Republicans.

"The thing I'm most surprised by is that a guy with no reputation as being a close and careful student of any policy – who was no policy wonk and wanted things reduced to a memo of a page and a half – how such a guy could become such a fire-breathing ideologue, with passionate commitment to all kinds of deeply held policy views," Buchanan says. "That's quite a transformation. Four years ago, I never would have predicted this. It comes not only from the gut but from a calculated decision that the best strategy for leading is to be bold and decisive, that the best way to protect your flank is to please your base. With the war there is also less of a need to worry about the political center in the short run."

ush may be his mother's son, but he has another set of roots: the conservative movement and a new generation of Republicans who believe in governing through strength.

"His dad grew up in a time when Republican leaders believed they were the minority in the country, under Richard Nixon, and therefore your capacity to stand in the middle of a room and say `I know everyone agrees with us' didn't exist," says Republican operative Grover Norquist, a close White House ally. "Bush grew up, politically, post-Reagan, when people could say, `I know if I articulate this correctly, 60 percent of the country will be with me.' There is a world of difference between old Republicans and younger Republicans, who are certain the country is with them and are more confident overall."

Bush has surrounded himself with unapologetic conservatives who share that outlook, one reason the administration never moved very far to the center domestically despite the narrow election victory. The first example of it was the tax cut, which Bush insisted should be $1.6 trillion, a seemingly impossible figure he did not back away from even when Democrats and moderate Republicans balked. The tactic worked. Ultimately, the naysayers came to him, passing the tax cut at $1.3 trillion. Bush declared it a victory.

That strain of conservative influence is most pronounced in his foreign policy, which has been infused with increasing muscularity over time. In particular, policy makers at the Pentagon – led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith – have encouraged Bush to use his natural boldness and stubbornness to enhance American power. Strength, they believe, should be wielded visibly and purposefully in order to protect national interests – especially after September 11. "If America leads, the world will follow" is a common refrain in the Defense Department and the West Wing.

Occasionally, Bush will say something about foreign policy that makes the rest of the world gasp. His desire to see Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," for example, horrified the diplomatic community. His demand that the United Nations "show some backbone" came across as an affront. But this was not a rhetorical slip. It was written into the script. It was an extension of his, and his advisers', worldview.

Some think this firm approach is especially needed in dealing with Arab countries – which, they argue, only understand military power. Given that combination of factors, it is easy to explain the momentum that propelled the US military into Baghdad.

But bypassing the United Nations to invade Iraq is only the latest example of Bush's single-minded approach toward the international community. He walked away from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement that had codified US-Russian nuclear reductions for decades, over the objections of the Russians and just about everyone else. He refused to pay minimal lip service to the Kyoto agreement on global warming – an arguably unnecessary move, since it never would have been ratified in the Senate anyway. He made it clear that the United States would not consider joining the International Criminal Court, a decision that even some Democrats agreed was wise but that added to the perception, especially at the United Nations, that Bush is a unilateralist.

Critics, both at home and abroad, complain that Bush is breaking all his campaign promises on foreign policy – especially with the Bush Doctrine, the response to September 11 that started out as a policy which drew no distinction between terrorists and their host countries. It has since evolved into a doctrine of preemptive action against "rogue" states such as Iraq, and officials have left open the possibility of applying it someday to North Korea, Syria, or Iran.

"Remember during the campaign Bush said they ought to be humble on the world stage? It's quite ironic now," Buchanan says. Bush officials, according to Buchanan, have been "astonishingly self-confident, given the uncertainties that attend any project like the one in Iraq. They have an emotional reaction to being challenged. They are surprised and offended by it."

In fact, although he talked about being humble and deplored "nation building" during the campaign, it was clear even then that Bush's chief foreign policy objective was to be the anti-Clinton. How that would take shape was impossible to know while he was still governor, but now it has become abundantly clear.

"Bush believes, whether it's domestic politics or international affairs, that if you have strength you exert it. You use it. You show it," says Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. "Signs of conciliation are going to be used by your adversaries as signs of weakness. Some intellectuals might write nice things about you, but your adversaries will use it to take advantage of you – that's his view. And that can work if you have that strength, but what you do along the way is you build lots of animosities, and you have all kinds of people who nurse their wounds and egos until you stumble and then are eager to jump on you with cleats."

Thomas Mann, presidential scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution, describes Bush as a "CEO-style person" who doesn't get bogged down in details. "He's ambitious, he's decisive, and he doesn't have second thoughts. He's not a man prone to great reflection or internal debate. He's got an ideology, he has almost a sense of providential calling, which removes doubts from him.

"There's something about born-again adults who screwed around for much of their lives and then had a religious experience, who then gain great confidence in what they're doing, a righteousness," Mann says. "It makes them better citizens, but it's not clear it makes them more thoughtful, deliberative, or wise. In Bush's case, it combines a fearlessness and swagger with an amazing sense of self-confidence. I don't think he entirely appreciates how people who disagree with him can get so offended by that style.

o critics who accuse Bush of refusing to compromise, administration officials point to isolated instances of bipartisan action, such as the 2001 education overhaul package he brokered with Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

White House communications director Dan Bartlett, when asked whether Bush has been too uncompromising with Democrats, immediately cites the education bill. He says Bush would never have been able to strong-arm or pressure a powerful Democrat such as Kennedy if he did not want to support the bill. "If you're trying to suggest that Ted Kennedy is bowing down to a Republican president, I think Ted Kennedy would take issue with that."

But Kennedy is by no means a latter-day Bob Bullock; indeed, he was one of the harshest critics of Bush's war against Iraq. And Democrats in Washington feel none of the good will that Bush generated among Democrats in Austin. After half a dozen Democrats supported the president's tax cut bill, Bush turned around and campaigned mercilessly against four who were up for reelection. One dropped out, and two others lost.

When he faces stiff opposition to any of his policies at home, Bush has his own negotiating style, which is to stand firm until it is clear defeat is imminent and then switch sides. He opposed creating a separate department of homeland security but then embraced it when it was inevitable. He dropped school vouchers from his education package the instant he knew he could not win. And just last month, when it appeared his proposed $726 billion tax cut would not survive in Congress intact, Bush preemptively lowered his target figure by one-third – acting as though he had always hoped for a tax cut totaling $550 billion. Then he sent his advisers out into the country on a two-week blitz to pressure senators to pass a tax package that size or larger – with the White House prepared to call it a victory.

Hard-right conservatives occasionally worry that Bush will "go wobbly," but with each apparent victory Bush has appeared emboldened to take his agenda even further. After September 11, pundits predicted that Bush would not raise campaign funds or return to the campaign trail for members of Congress. He did – and won. When Trent Lott stepped aside as Senate majority leader after making racially insensitive remarks, Democrats assumed that Bush would not dare to renominate to the federal bench Miguel Estrada, a Republican lawyer accused of racial insensitivity. Bush did.

Most conservatives are delighted by the president's perseverance, and they dismiss Democrats who complain that the president isn't accommodating enough. "That is what losers say," says GOP operative Norquist. "When you're losing, you go, `You should negotiate with me.' "

ithin the first three weeks of hostilities in Iraq, Bush flew across the Atlantic Ocean to meet with Tony Blair twice and deviated from his usual schedule to host the British prime minister at Camp David midweek. The visits were peculiar from a public relations standpoint: Blair risked further aggravating his angry constituents about Iraq every time he stood next to Bush, and Bush only appeared awkward and ineloquent next to Blair.

One possible explanation is that Bush has grown genuinely fond of Blair. He respects Blair for not only backing him on Iraq but also for bucking public opinion at home. It is easy to imagine that Bush sees glimmers of himself in Blair, who is devoutly Christian and tends to describe the world in moral terms.

Someone asked Bush earlier this year whether he feared Blair might suffer for supporting him on Iraq, given the giant protests amassing in England before war broke out. He didn't hesitate. "I think anytime somebody shows courage, when it comes to peace, that the people will eventually get that," Bush said. "You know, size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group." Bush could have been describing himself.

Bush hates protests even more than most presidents. They are, after all, a very public challenge to his authority (and are mostly carried out by liberals). At least once during the presidential campaign, his staff rerouted an event to keep him away from a protest. In Europe last year, Bush brushed off a reporter who dared ask him about the thousands of demonstrators who had followed him at every stop. "So you go to a protest – and I drive through the streets of Berlin, seeing hundreds of people waving," Bush said dismissively. (At the same press conference in Paris, held jointly with French president Jacques Chirac, Bush made fun of the reporter for addressing the French leader in his native language. "The guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he's intercontinental," Bush said.)

It is too early to predict whether Bush will decide to become more magnanimous toward the United Nations, or Democrats, or France, in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. There may come a day when Bush needs his opponents' cooperation, if, for example, Congress turns Democratic or another international crisis arises. Some analysts believe he could choose to become a dealmaker once his reelection in 2004 is secure. On the other hand, if everything is going his way, why should he?

"I would be surprised if there's a significant alteration in the administration's approach," says Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School. "This sort of right-or-wrong approach didn't begin with the debate on Iraq. The only thing that would be likely to affect that is evidence that it is causing immediate and tangible consequences for the United States."

But there's the rub. "If there are negative consequences to these actions," Walt says, "most of them are going to be visited upon us later, long after George W. Bush is no longer president."

He has glared at the cameras, threatened his adversaries, even joked about running a dictatorship. The outbursts, although occasional, have fed the cowboy caricature that sums up why a large number of people around the world are so furious with his administration and, by extension, the United States.

Personally, I don't find anything menacing about GWB. He seems like a guy that will treat you with respect and patience until you piss him off.

Funny how I can watch the same news conference and not see any of these "nuances" that the media elite are able to unerringly pick up on.

I guess that's fair, I never had any trouble telling when Clinton was lying but the elite media never could ... or didn't care.

This article was in the Sunday Globe Magazine which had on its cover, what I can only describe as, the foulest ugliest caricature of Gerge Bush.

It completly deterred me from looking at the article, or anything else inside.

I stopped reading the Boston Globe twenty years ago when it dropped the Wizard of Id and BC, the only two things worth reading in that paper. The only thing now left is to look at the near naked pictures of men and women in underwear. I can only guess that the main readership falls into two categories, men and women who like to look at near naked women, and men and women who like to look at near naked men. I suspect with the Globe readership the latter is more the case.

The Boston Globe, The New York Slimes, The Washington Post, etc., etc., etc. In their utter stupidity, they have ignored such factors as FoxNews, conservative talk radio and the Internet where folks like me can hear and read the truth about America and what a great country America is. Rush Limbaugh reported today about a cop who entered a public school in Maine (?) and took pictures of a teacher's room where President Bush was shown as having his mouth taped, the American Flag was stuffed in a combat boot and the boot was crushing a doll. There were also pictures of
Che Guevera and Fidel Castro. Rush reported that the media reporting the incident were all over the cop, but never mentioned what was in the class room. The public high school officials were very defensive of the teacher and condemned the cop, who didn't want this crap being taught in this high school. As Americans wake up to the liberal news folks, they will sink. They make the mistake thinking that all Americans are stupid and we are not. Thank God for FoxNews, Rush, Savage, Hannity and most of all, FreeRepublic!

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