Profile: George W Bush

Not for the first time we have a President of the United States who enjoys an extraordinary and sustained level of support from the American public but is misunderstood and mistrusted on our side of the Atlantic. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was often derided in British and European opinion as being no more than a B-movie actor who was not up to the job intellectually.

Even when he turned out to be an immensely successful president who pursued his goals on taxation, defence and international relations with great clarity and success a huge proportion of otherwise well-informed people in Europe continued to regard him as little more than an imbecile.

The same people say many of the same things about George W Bush. He is not an intellectual. He uses strange language. He knows nothing of the rest of the world. He doesn't look as if he can think straight.

Mr Bush can turn up at the United Nations, as he did on September 12, and deliver a speech that is shrewd in its diplomacy, flawless in its delivery and unanswerable in its logic but his critics cling doggedly to their initial preconceptions.

I have been lucky enough over the past four years, both as Leader of the Opposition and since leaving that office, to see and talk to Mr Bush in a variety of situations, from the governor's office in Texas to his current residence at the White House. Being on the Right of politics and an enthusiast about America, I am, of course, biased, but I have always found him completely different from his popular caricature.

Late one night in December 2000 as I was being driven home up the A1 at the end of yet another pre-election tour, I placed a call to the Bush office in Texas, simply intending to leave a message and wish him well as the five-week-long struggle over "hanging chads" in Florida came to its climax. T

he leadership of the free world was about to be decided. "Hang on," said his assistant after a minute, "he has heard you are on the line and wants to have a chat."

For the best part of the next half-hour he proceeded to discuss anything and everything in a manner so calm, courteous and relaxed that you would never have guessed that he was waiting to hear in the next few hours whether he was president-elect of the United States of America.

He wanted to know what was happening in British politics, what the issues were, how Tony Blair was perceived (and all of this only after detailed enquiries about the health and happiness of my wife) and then analysed the key results in his own election state by state, how the labour unions had turned out the Democrat vote more effectively than he had expected, how the campaign had changed in the previous few days, what issues and places he would have to concentrate on over the next four years and so on. This is what he is like: fluent, personable and, yes, very definitely clever.

There are a number of things I particularly like about this man. The first is his self-discipline. One morning in 1986 he woke up with a hangover and decided that his drinking was excessive and had to end.

He does not believe in lengthy psychoanalytical agonising over such things, telling a Washington Post journalist two years ago: "I am not really the type to wander off and sit down and go through deep wrestling with my soul. I just quit drinking. Enough. Totally. I stopped. Not that complicated. Can we talk about something else?"

He decided and he stuck to it. His motivation to do so, and strictly to look after himself with rest, exercise and good diet, is supported not only by the memory of what he was doing to himself with alcohol but by a powerful sense of moral responsibility.

This in turn is fuelled by religious belief, also acquired in the 1980s, a fervent and evangelical readiness to talk about Jesus that is far more familiar in modern America than in Europe.

His daily schedule oozes self-discipline: invitations to an evening at the White House are for six o'clock. Dinner is served before seven and you are on your way by nine. He finishes the day with an hour's work and is almost always in bed at 10 o'clock.

Running and working out feature in almost every day. He is passionate about running, usually spending the first five minutes of any meeting with me talking to Seb Coe (my private secretary when leader of the opposition) about times, distances and whether he did the presidential seven-minute mile that morning.

He thinks running saved his life by revealing the damage that smoking and drinking do. "It is only when I am exercising," he told Seb, "particularly running, that I feel spiritually and physically sound. I am a competitive person and running is part of my competitive nature."

Needless to say, his own self-discipline has left him with deeply felt scorn for his predecessor. Bill Clinton's interminable meetings, late-night snacks, infidelity and haphazard attempts to fight terrorism - "firing off a million-dollar missile to hit a camel in the butt" - are the polar opposite of how he believes a president should behave. I think I know what he would have thought about the Tony and Bill show at Blackpool last week.

The second thing I like about this President is his total lack of pomposity. He cannot bear pretentious people. Gone is the endless list of film celebrities, Kevin Spacey and the like, who were brought to the White House in the Clinton years - the people now invited to stay there overnight are mainly from Texas and tend to be state politicians, country and western singers or just old friends.

Perhaps this is just a Yorkshireman's appreciation of a Texan, but I prefer a leader who keeps his feet on the ground by keeping the company of people who were his friends when he was not President. This attitude does much to explain why some people look down on him.

"I am getting this rap about somehow I don't appreciate intellectuals," he said a couple of years ago. "I do appreciate smart people. What I don't appreciate is people who think they are all of a sudden smarter than the average person because they happen to have an Ivy League degree."

A third attribute is that he is extraordinarily personable. Even by the standards of assiduous political networkers he is good at remembering what you said and what matters to you. A good point made to him in a meeting results in a handwritten note by him being delivered by the US Embassy the following week, saying how much he appreciated it and has been thinking about it.

He has the charm and courtesy of a Southern gentleman. Having mispronounced Ffion's name after our first meeting - "It's good to be here with William and Effion" - to the titters of the Westminster press corps, he has ever since wanted to know how she is, how her career is going and pronounces her name perfectly.

He shows an almost constant sense of humour and appears completely happy in his own skin, but it is vital to remember that his is an American and very much a Texan skin.

The first time I met him he was sitting in his office in cowboy boots that said "Governor" on the front, something considered perfectly normal in Texas. I told him that in Britain he would not even get away with a baseball cap. An American President must be understood in an American context.

The fourth thing to know about George W Bush is that he is far, far brighter than his reputation. When my friend Richard Perle, now one of his leading defence policy advisers, first went along to brief Candidate Bush with all the military experts and endless charts and tables, Mr Bush stopped them as they were about to make their presentation.

"Now, I know you are about to show me a lot of figures," he said. "First of all I want us to discuss what the American Armed Forces are for and what our objectives are and then the figures will fall into place."

Perle and his colleagues were enormously impressed, not by Mr Bush's knowledge at that stage but by his readiness to admit to what he didn't know and his ability to ask the right question. He avoids getting mired in detail without thinking things out from first principles and as a result is able to think "out of the box".

The fifth and main thing to know and like about George W Bush is that he has deep convictions and a clear sense of mission. In many ways he is a product of the 1960s, in the sense that he acquired an enduring hostility to the attitudes prevalent at the time.

He and his great friend and strategist Karl Rove refined their political philosophy from a list of the symptoms of the Sixties that they saw as still affecting America: elitism, cynicism, anti-Americanism, self-absorption and psychobabble. Mr Bush believes that America has been run for too long by an out-of-touch elite of which he definitely does not feel a part.

He means to replace failed liberal ideas with his own sense of the power of self-help and responsibility. His "compassionate conservatism" is fuelled by his belief that you cannot help others unless you are strong, and all who can help themselves have a responsibility to do so. Those who are irresponsible should be punished.

These attitudes - a concept of compassion far removed from a Europe where the word compassion is still equated with state intervention - have defined his policies on crime, education and welfare. To him, strict punishments are not only effective but reinforce a sense of responsibility to oneself and others.

Under him in Texas, that meant many more people in the prisons and capital punishment on a large scale. This goes along with a clear sense of right and wrong and a belief in the existence of good and evil.

Now, as people seek to understand the ironclad determination of this President to take on Iraq and root out international terrorism, the same clarity and resolve that Mr Bush has applied to domestic policy in Texas is being applied to international relations.

By way of illustration, I recall a conversation I had with him in the summer of 2001 when I asked him how he would deal with Europe's opposition to his Ballistic Missile Defence programme. Pointing out that a number of other countries would in the end go along with it, he confided to me, "I have a secret plan: I'm going to do it anyway."

The political atmosphere in America is in any case entirely different from that in any other country in the world, the result of a searing experience on September 11 with which other countries sympathise but which they do not feel with anything like the same intensity and emotion.

Americans are now grimly, utterly determined. At their head is a President who believes that just as it has been his own responsibility to keep himself strong and fit, so it is America's responsibility to make itself stronger and more powerful than ever and to take on the tasks for which others have neither the self-discipline nor the means.

I bought "Fighting Back," today Miss Marple. And it was a very interesting experience at Barnes and Noble.

First, the clerk had never heard of the book. I was inwardly raging since we all know the big book stores all hide the conservative books. But I politely commented that it was a best seller. She had trouble locating it on her computer. So I mentioned that I KNEW it had been shipped several days ago and it really out to be right out front.

The clerk produced a copy from somewhere in the bowels of the store and I thanked her. Then I went searching to see where B & N had hidden it.

I located it on a table facing the children's dept. which is at the rear of the store. The top of the table contained books about movie stars and sports figures. "Fighting Back" was on the bottom shelf at the back.

So I looked to the right, and the left, and I scooped up a couple of copies and put them on top of the table where other people could see them.

When I got to the checkout, the clerk looked at the cover and asked, "Is this a pro-Bush book or an anti-Bush book??

"Pro," I told her. She smiled and said, "Oh good, then *I'll" read it.

I was stunned. But finally said, "You mean there's a clerk in B & N who isn't a liberal?" She smiled and told me that she has a daily fight with their liberal attitude.

I told her about putting two books on top of the table. She was delighted and said that later she'd go back there and put some more on the top of the table.

She also said that it should be on their best seller list soon and would be displayed in the front of the store.

Every little bit helps the cause. LOL!

Had similar experience at Barnes and Noble in Houston. First the clerk never heard of the book. The book was not out where all new books are and the clerk located the book by the author. Found thebook in the bowels of the store and when I asked why it was hidden he told me it had just arrived and not yet put out. Yeah, sure. I said it was all over the internet and was bound to be a best seller. Is Barnes and Noble a liberal store? Or are they just slow.

The first time I met him he was sitting in his office in cowboy boots that said "Governor" on the front, something considered perfectly normal in Texas.

I'll bet twenty bucks those boots were made by RJ "Rocky" Carroll, who has been making boots practically forever in his little shop, "RJ's Boot Company", on Ella Blvd here in Houston.

I first met RJ about ten years ago when I dropped into his dingy, hole-in-the-wall shop to get some shoes repaired. At first I thought the shop wasn't even open, since the front window was so encrusted with unwashed dust and dirt that I couldn't even see inside. From the outside, the place looked abandoned. I stepped inside and found a little stoop-shouldered man with a sparse beard.

He proudly told me he made the President's boots, and I thought "yeah, sure". Then he pulled out his scrapbook of letters from various Presidents and major celebrities (Dolly Parton, Liz Taylor, etc.), and showed me the photos of himself with the elder Bush and many others, and in old-style Texas tradition he talked my ear off for the next half hour. Here's one set of boots (of several) that he made for the elder Bush:

Here are Liz Taylor's boots:

I've been back many times since then when I've needed various bits of leatherwork done, and now his wall and scrapbook are adorned with photos of himself with W. Bush and thank-you letters on White House stationery.

From the busy street outside, all you can see is typical urban Houston, with the KFC across the street and the wheel shop next door. But inside, it's like a trip to rural Texas fifty years ago. They just don't make shops (or proprieters) like that anymore.

Here's a great New York Times story about the presidential boot maker

People should understand this basic difference: Clinton was a man with no friends, only political allies, a man playing the president who naturally thought of himself more as a celebrity than anything else, hence his affinity for low-rent players and brassy women.

George Bush isn't playing, he is the President.

Thanks for the ping Pokey!

<< "I have a secret plan: I'm going to do it anyway." >>

May God's blessings continue to be heaped upon Our Beloved FRaternal Republic, including in the being of Our President and Armed Forces Commander In Chief, George Walker Bush!

And how wonderful for you and for the United Kingdom, Ivan, that you have, in waiting; in Abslute contrast to its execrable KKKli'toon clone, Blair -- and as Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, The Right Honorable William Hague Esquire.

Impressive piece!

Warm FReegards, Y'All -- B A

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He means what he says

"I have a secret plan: I'm going to do it anyway."