President George W. Bush

Bush's Iron Triangle: Karl Rove, left, strategist;

Joe Allbaugh, campaign manager; Karen Hughes, communications chief. (Tom Lankes, Austin American Statesman - AP file photo)

By Dan Balz and Terry M. Neal
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 22, 2000; Page A01

On a sunny autumn afternoon, George W. Bush is perched in his front-row seat in the forward cabin of his chartered campaign plane, somewhere between Philadelphia and New York. He has put the pressure of the campaign out of his mind to talk about how he might govern as president, a topic that he says makes him optimistic at a time—a month ago—when polls show him struggling.

"I'm the kind of person who trusts people," he says. "And I empower people. I am firm with people. On the other hand, I'm a decider. I do not agonize. I think, I listen, and I trust my instincts and I trust the advice I get. And I'm an accessible person."

It seems a classic Bush response: No high-blown theories or historical references or citations from the scholars, just something simple and straightforward, what you see is what you get. But if the presidential campaign has shown anything, it is that there is no simple answer to the question of what kind of president Bush would be.

He has spent almost six years as governor of the nation's second-biggest state and almost 18 months on the presidential campaign trail. He has engaged in three debates against Vice President Gore. Those experiences suggest some clear patterns of behavior and provide clues to how Bush might govern from the Oval Office. But for every clue there is a question, for every pattern a concern. He is, in the end, a study in contradictions.

Is the real Bush, for example, the candidate who often seems tongue-tied or uninterested talking policy along the campaign trail or the man who has prodded his staff to produce innovative policies on education, Social Security and nuclear arms?

Is he a man with core conservative principles that would define his presidency or a results-oriented politician more interested in a deal than the shape of the compromise?

Is he so dependent on a handful of long-time advisers that he risks being isolated from competing ideas and advice or does the emphasis he places on loyalty ensure discipline and efficiency in running a large operation, particularly in times of crisis?

Finally, would his governing style help to reduce partisanship and gridlock in Washington, or does he overestimate the power of his personality and people skills in forging coalitions behind his policy proposals?

The answer to both sides of every question arguably could be yes, and therein lies the puzzle of what kind of president Bush would be.

Bush's advisers paint a compelling portrait of a chief executive who concentrates on the big things, trusts his staff to fill in the details and gets things done. Based on his performance on the campaign trail, that is an idealized view.

When he has put his mind to it—coming off the mat after losing the New Hampshire primary, picking a running mate, writing his convention speech, preparing for the debates—he has achieved considerable success. Day in, day out, however, he has been far less consistent and engaged. And for all the strategic farsightedness of his campaign, there have been notable lapses. He was caught totally by surprise in New Hampshire, for example, and ignored almost until it was too late the rising demand for prescription drug benefits for senior citizens.

His assertion that Texas was a real proving ground is also problematic: What worked there may be less effective in Washington, where the partisan lines are more finely drawn and the policy differences more ingrained.

But in his own mind, Bush has an uncomplicated view of governing and how he would approach it. Identify the problems, find smart people, build a sense of teamwork and go to work to solve them.

The most persistent and troubling questions about what kind of leader Bush would be center on his interest in policy, his grasp of issues, and his overall curiosity about the world. On the campaign trail, Bush often projects an image of the student who rarely did his homework and who skated from subject to subject, learning just enough to get through the big exam.

Put him in front of a group of citizens at a policy roundtable discussion, as his campaign has done from time to time, and he seems almost bored. President Clinton reveled in such events as a candidate. Gore appears overly eager to impress voters with his breadth of knowledge. Bush listens politely, regurgitates an abbreviated version of his message and moves on as quickly as he can.

And yet he has built one of the best policy shops any presidential candidate has assembled and relies on a network of advisers that includes some of the brightest conservative thinkers in the country. He is frequently in touch not only with his policy director, Josh Bolten, and his trio of policy advisers—Lawrence Lindsey on economics, Condoleezza Rice on foreign policy, and Stephen Goldsmith on domestic policy—but also with many of the younger aides.

Rice said the policy process Bush has created in the campaign has the hallmarks of a presidential-style system, albeit on a smaller scale. The candidate's instincts, she argued, reflect someone willing to push the edge of the envelope on policy, whether on rethinking from a conservative's perspective the federal role in education or proposing unilateral and potentially deep cuts in nuclear weapons. "It's not radical, but he clearly doesn't accept the status quo or the orthodoxy of the way you think about policy initiatives," Rice said.

Bush advisers describe him as an executive fully engaged in the policymaking process who offers his staff clear guidance, prods them to meet his expectations and makes his own calls when his advisers are divided. "I haven't dealt with very many elected officials—and none at his level—who were as intense about policy as he is," said Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis who serves as the head of Bush's domestic policy team.

Nowhere is the evidence about Bush more conflicting than in this arena.

For every sign of impatience with windy experts or extended discussions, there is a story from aides about the session that stretched into the night at the governor's mansion with Bush deeply engaged. His work habits as governor seem to reflect an executive only loosely engaged in the details of his job. But asked about reports that Bush has a short attention span and cannot stand long meetings, John Cogan of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who has advised Bush on economic policy, said, "It's just wrong from my experience. Just dead wrong."

For every story about a Bush who is little more than a receptacle for advice from his own experts, there is another about Bush taking over the direction of meetings with his own questions. Goldsmith used to prepare detailed agendas for the early issue tutorials for Bush, then see them dissolve within minutes. "He would totally disrupt the agenda," Goldsmith said. "He would drive it with his questions and move it to where he wanted to move it. He managed to reduce a lot of stuff to a narrower group of policy options that he wanted to be briefed on."

At times, Bush's questions can be surprisingly elementary: Just what is the Social Security debt, who is it owed to and how does it get repaid? What would happen if the United States were attacked by chemical or biological weapons and how could we defend ourselves? Why does the United States have a military?

Such questions reveal Bush's lack of familiarity with many of the issues that might confront him in the White House, and are the basis for the contention by Gore and the Democrats that he is too inexperienced to be president. Bush advisers say they show something quite different, a man confident enough to show what he doesn't know, an executive who expects his advisers to know more than he does about their areas of expertise, and a leader willing to force those around him to rethink what they know.

One military expert who worked under President Ronald Reagan and who sat in on early defense strategy sessions said, "Bush is definitely more engaged. And even though Reagan had more experience" in governing, Bush "is more interested in detail."

Advisers say Bush has tried to keep polls and politics away from his policy team. And even Bush has joked that if his were a poll-driven campaign, there is no way they would be pushing a $1.3 trillion tax cut over nine years.

When the campaign was making decisions on Bush's Social Security plan, spokesman Ari Fleischer, who previously worked for the House Ways and Means Committee, reported that there was great concern among some House Republicans about the wisdom of touching the "third rail" of American politics. "The governor just looked at me and cut me off," Fleischer said. "He said, 'I'm going to do this. This is what leadership is all about.' "

But the seeming absence of politics in the policymaking process is a virtue only up to a point, as Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton learned when they let experts, working in private, develop their health care plan in 1993. Bush ran into a similar problem in 1997 with a proposal to overhaul the Texas tax system that had not been fully vetted politically. It turned out to be the biggest defeat of his governorship.

When Bush was developing his tax plan for the presidential campaign, he asked his economic advisers to find a solution to what he calls "the tollgate problem," the high marginal tax rates effectively facing lower-income workers attempting to move into the middle class. "I absolutely insisted that ... we dedicate a lot of money to helping those at the bottom of the economic ladder," Bush says.

His advisers went to work and after a series of meetings were nearly unanimous in their recommendation, splitting 7-1 on a plan that they thought satisfied Bush's demands. Faced with this advice, Bush balked. The solution wasn't comprehensive enough to satisfy him. "You guys are smart guys," Lindsey recalls Bush telling his team. "Go back and solve it."

Eventually they did, but the overall package has proved to be a political liability. Bush touts his plan as providing tax cuts to lower-income workers, but the proposal still provides far more help to the wealthiest Americans. And the size of the tax cut dwarfed even the most ambitious plan put forward earlier by congressional Republicans. He has struggled to defend it throughout the campaign.

How then to reconcile the public evidence of a candidate who often seems disengaged from real debate on issues and the private portrait of an executive guiding his advisers with clear directions and crisp decisions? For one, it depends on the policy. On education, there is no attempt by his advisers to offer a gauzy view of the boss. His passion and knowledge are clear. But on unfamiliar terrain, Bush is still learning and would be as president.

Bush advisers say the governor is at heart a problem-solver, an executive less interested in long discussions than in getting to the bottom line. As he put it once, "I'm no fine-tuner." In contrast to Clinton, who loved the give-and-take of policy debate but who often agonized over decisions, Bush may be less knowledgeable, less interested and less committed to the details of his own proposals. But when he puts his mind to it, he also might be a far crisper decision-maker.

When Bush was asked in the first presidential debate for an example of how he handled a difficult or unexpected moment, he had little to choose from in his political career, telling a story about visiting victims of natural disasters. The crises he has faced as governor have been minor in comparison to what might confront him as president.

But two episodes during the campaign provide some insight into how he handles political adversity or the kinds of unexpected issues that arise in every presidency. One was his loss to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the New Hampshire primary, the other his failure to address health care and prescription drugs earlier and more aggressively.

Bush lost the New Hampshire primary by 19 percentage points, the worst defeat ever suffered in a primary by a candidate who went on to win his party's nomination. The loss revealed clear weaknesses in what had been seen as a superbly run campaign. Bush had taken the state for granted and campaigned with a sense of entitlement rather than the hands-on style demanded by New Hampshire's independent-minded voters. He also miscalculated the mood of the electorate. McCain found a vein of support when he promoted debt reduction over big tax cuts. Bush stubbornly stuck to his tax-cut plan, which even in tax-sensitive New Hampshire proved a tough sell.

Bush learned of his defeat on the afternoon of Feb. 1 from early exit polls. According to a number of people who saw him that day or the next, he refused to cast blame and reassured his staff that no heads would roll. "He was the best guy in the room," one adviser said. "He said, 'I got my [expletive] kicked.' He didn't blame it on nine other people."

The next day Bush made a point of calling aides still in Austin for the clear purpose of boosting morale. "He was as calm as I've seen him after the loss in New Hampshire," said Bolten, who got one of the calls. "There was no finger-pointing. He said we lost it straight up, let's move on."

The campaign flew to South Carolina, for what would turn out to be a politically disastrous stop at Bob Jones University, although that would not be clear until later. At the end of the week, the campaign returned to Austin. There were reports that a big summit meeting was on the agenda. Instead, Bush retreated to his ranch in central Texas. His aides were left to find a strategy to turn around the campaign.

"That was one of those moments when I didn't want to be surrounded by people," Bush explained. "I needed space. I wanted time with my family to be alone."

Bush now seems slightly defensive at the notion that he appears to have been largely disengaged at the most difficult moment of his campaign. "There are phones at the ranch," he said in explaining why he did not stay in Austin. But in some ways it was a rerun of how he has sometimes handled the making of policy inside his campaign, in essence telling his staff: You are smart people. Go figure it out.

They did. Communications director Karen Hughes, on her way to get a haircut that Saturday morning, came up with the new frame for the campaign: "A Reformer With Results." Chief strategist Karl Rove called Bush the next day to tell him about it.

But more than a new slogan was needed to put Bush back on track. While Bush himself campaigned with new intensity and made a point of talking directly to voters, what was most notable about the campaign's new approach was its willingness to go on the attack against McCain after promising the campaign would always stay positive. With his candidacy in deep trouble, Bush's competitive instincts took over, and by the time he returned to the campaign trail, he was throwing the kitchen sink at McCain.

Bush's tardy announcement of a prescription drug plan—which was not made until after Labor Day—demonstrates the tension between a politician with a clear set of priorities and one who may lack the flexibility, instinct or interest to react to problems or events outside his normal line of sight.

In Texas, Bush was famous for staying focused on the handful of issues on which he campaigned in 1994, and he has tried to do the same running for president. His four-part agenda includes tax cuts, education reform, Social Security and Medicare reform and rebuilding the military. Everything else is subordinate.

As a result, despite polls showing rising concern about HMOs and the cost of prescription drugs and evidence that the number of Americans without health insurance was rising, Bush nibbled around the edges of health care for months and months. Whenever asked when he would offer a health care plan, he had a standard rejoinder: "I talk about it all the time."

He offered small programs to encourage Americans to buy long-term care insurance and to encourage small businesses to provide health care coverage to their workers. When he gave a speech outlining his Social Security proposal, Bush included a section about his determination to reform Medicare but mostly dropped the subject.

Behind the scenes, his campaign was struggling. When Bush finally asked for something on prescription drugs, his advisers were far apart and the candidate grew impatient. "The 200th hour of health care policy debate reached the level of human patience," Goldsmith said. Eventually Bush was forced to referee the dispute to produce a plan that marries long-term reform of Medicare to a short-term injection of funds to the states to provide drug coverage for low-income seniors.

Bush believes that a presidency with scores of priorities is a presidency without any priorities. But lack of foresight and flexibility can cripple a presidency as well. Bush now admits he was slow to recognize the prescription drug problem. "I held off a little bit," he said, acknowledging that the decision to put together his own prescription drug proposal, which wasn't announced until last month, was "an example of doing something because of what was taking place politically."

In Texas, where the legislature meets only once every two years and the governorship is a constitutionally weak office, focusing on a few big issues makes sense. A president doesn't often have that luxury.

For an enterprise of its size, Bush's campaign has produced few stories of internal squabbles and feuding. Unlike Gore, who had relied on a changing cast of characters throughout his campaign and saw considerable staff turnover during his eight years as vice president, Bush's inner circle has remained remarkably stable for the past six years.

Bush demands loyalty from his staff and returns the favor. He is suspicious of political consultants, hired guns and policy advisers with their own agendas or egos. "I look for humility in people," Bush said. "I also want to make sure that the people are there for a cause as opposed to themselves."

Bush values teamwork and the campaign has reached out to scores of people for advice on policy and politics. But the key to success on his team can be illustrated by the differing experiences of Josh Bolten and Tom Tauke as the campaign was getting ready to be launched.

Tauke, a former U.S. House member from Iowa and longtime friend of Bush who is an executive with Verizon Communications, was helping Bush put together the campaign and was in line to be the campaign manager. Bolten was working for the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs in London, contemplating a promotion to New York when he received a call from Tauke.

Bolten had worked for Bush's father in the White House but did not know the Texas governor. He soon found himself the object of a Bush charm offensive, and it wasn't long before he was ready to move to Austin to become policy director for the campaign.

A few weeks later he got an e-mail from Tauke titled "Glitch," which turned out to mean that Tauke would not be joining the campaign after all. Why things worked out for Bolten and did not for Tauke can be summed up in a few words: Bush's Iron Triangle.

Bolten was coming aboard in a senior position but one that did not threaten the trio of advisers who long have been at Bush's side: Hughes, Rove and Joe Allbaugh, Bush's gubernatorial chief of staff and now his campaign manager. Tauke's arrival would have, and the episode sent a clear message at the start of the campaign that most of the power would be concentrated in a few hands.

Michael Gerson, who is Bush's chief speechwriter and worked on Robert J. Dole's campaign in 1996, said, "On the Dole campaign, there were several competing factions. Here it's very clear who is in charge. Josh and I are not in charge. We work for Karen and Karl and Joe." Condoleezza Rice called Bush's staff "a pretty low-key group that doesn't have a lot of ego on the line. It's small enough and close enough to the governor so it's not hierarchical [with] people jockeying for position in a hierarchy."

But is the small but powerful inner circle so devoted to Bush that he is shielded from good advice outside the circle? Equally important is the question of whether Bush's closest advisers can and do give him unvarnished advice and criticism when he needs it.

There is very little evidence that the Bush inner circle is receptive to bad news. Campaign chairman Don Evans, a businessman and longtime friend of Bush, insists that the governor's closest advisers are not blind loyalists and instead are a group who can deliver no-nonsense advice before problems turn to crises. But the best example he could muster of someone delivering bad news to Bush came after the loss in New Hampshire. Bush, Evans and their wives were in Bush's hotel suite when Evans said to him, "After New Hampshire, I said, we're going to look back six months from now and say, 'You know, this was a good thing,' " Evans said. "That wasn't exactly what he wanted to hear at the time."

Bush's moods and emotions are transparent to those around him; he is not one to brood in private. "He's an open person," Hughes said. "He tends to talk about whatever he's thinking about." Nor is he shy about offering criticism. Small factual mistakes in briefing papers, typos in speech drafts, lines in television ad scripts, all can send Bush into anger. "If I think something's wrong, I dang sure tell them," Bush said.

Bolten said Bush called him recently about a script for a television ad on health care, questioning the accuracy of one line. When Bolten launched into a windy answer, Bush cut him off. "I don't want to hear an argument. Just tell me why you think it's accurate," he snapped.

But aides say he can be extremely supportive in difficult times. Early in the campaign, Bush delivered a speech critical of his own party that included a line penned by Gerson that was interpreted by many conservatives as a direct attack on one of their heroes, former federal judge Robert H. Bork. Gerson, who had not meant to single out Bork, was badly shaken up by the reaction. "Bush called me at home and was very reassuring," Gerson said. "He said, 'Don't worry about it. I've been through this before. It's not a big deal.' "

Bush has an easy way with strangers and a wisecracking sense of humor with friends and acquaintances. Until the final weeks of the campaign, he enjoyed small talk with reporters at the back of his campaign plane and has learned how to put people at ease in serious moments.

When he met with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov last spring, knowing that Ivanov had served as ambassador to Spain, Bush began their conversation in Spanish. "Let's speak Spanish and that way they won't know what we're talking about," Bush said, according to Rice. She added, "He had a kind of twinkle in his eye because he knew he'd thrown everybody off, and Ivanov laughed. But it was a way of breaking the ice."

His accessibility and charm helped him build a strong relationship with Texas legislators during his first year in office and in no small measure ensured that his first legislative session was an overwhelming success. He would depend on those same skills as president to keep his campaign promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together. Whether he could replicate the staff structure he has relied on in Austin is another question. Even some loyal supporters, with experience in past Republican administrations, doubt that he can.

From the beginning of his campaign, Bush has pointed to Texas for validation of his potential to be president. His record, he argues, shows that he keeps his campaign promises. His style, he says, shows a leader who has brought Republicans and Democrats together. His landslide reelection proved, well, that his critics are wrong. But is Texas like America? Can he export a style of politics that has worked effectively in the particular political climate of the Lone Star State to the far different climate of the nation's capital?

If he becomes president, Bush would concentrate on the handful of issues that have been at the center of his campaign: a big tax cut; emphasis on educational accountability and excellence; bold reforms of Social Security and Medicare, and a desire to rebuild the military.

That could be where the problems begin. In each case, Bush's policy agenda contains elements that are untested, highly controversial or ideologically divisive. His 1994 Texas campaign agenda that called for reforming education, welfare and juvenile justice was, by comparison, far less controversial. There was a consensus for both welfare reform and tougher penalties for youthful offenders, and a version of education reform was already moving through the legislative machinery. Bush provided a significant boost to all three, but he had the wind at his back from the beginning.

Any one of Bush's major campaign planks could keep a president occupied for most of his first year in office; Bush seems determined to try to do them all at once. How? His solution sounds easy. Lower the partisan temperature in Washington, bring Democrats and Republicans together, find common ground, avoid the blame game and share the credit. In Texas that worked in part because of the generally conservative cast of state politics and because Bush forged a deep relationship with the Democratic lieutenant governor, the late Bob Bullock. In Washington, he may have trouble finding someone like the shrewd, crafty and exceedingly powerful Bullock and would certainly find Democrats less conservative than those back home.

Beyond that Bush may put too much emphasis on his ability to charm members of the House and Senate, or assume that once having charmed them, they would pass the legislation he sends them. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, who has helped organize a series of discussions with the American Enterprise Institute this year on how Bush and Gore would govern, said Bush may be counting too much on the power of personality. "He overestimates the extent to which personal skills and outreach can overcome the partisan divide and underestimates the extent to which policy drives politics," Mann said.

Maybe Bush's conservatism is eminently flexible. In Texas he has allowed Democrats to massage his own proposals to the point they are barely recognizable--and barely conservative. Would he allow that to happen to his demand for partial privatization of Social Security? Not likely. Would he scale back his missile defense plan in the face of Democratic resistance to get something going? Perhaps. Would he abandon the school vouchers in his education plan to preserve testing and accountability? Almost certainly. For all the rhetoric of the campaign, it is far more obvious what Bush wants than what he would actually take.

Finally there is the issue that Bush has raised from the day he began his campaign: his desire to change the tone of politics in Washington. That hope appears genuine and his record in Texas demonstrates it. But he has run a more personal and partisan campaign for the presidency than he did in any of his campaigns in Texas. Can he now easily forge a governing coalition with the New Democrats in Congress, as he has suggested, and if he were to make genuine compromises with those Democrats, would conservative Republicans silently assent?

The 54-year-old Bush has carried himself a remarkable distance in politics in a relatively short time on the strength of personality, self-confidence, the discipline to stay focused on his priorities and a competitive streak that blazes just below the surface. But the questions that have dogged him throughout the presidential campaign reflect concerns among his critics that he may be reaching beyond that for which he is fully prepared. Those fears may prove to be unfounded, but they are what the voters will be asked to judge when they go to the polls next month.

For an article on Vice President Gore and his leadership style, click here.

© 2000 The Washington Post Company