George W Bush: Is he up to it?

History also tells you that, for all the belittling of the neophyte governor of Texas, and for all the bizarre events preceding his narrowest of victories, George W Bush now has it all to play for. As he put it last Wednesday night, he will give it his all. And if there’s one thing we’ve learnt these past few months and years it is this: underestimate him at your peril.

In this regard, the Kennedy parallel is particularly instructive. Like Kennedy, W was born into a political family, but was never at ease with the career chosen for him. For the longest time, he ducked it.

“I don’t think he really knew if he wanted politics - if he was going to remain with it - or what politics was going to do with him,” said JFK’s secretary, Mary Davis, about her boss in his earlier years.

“No, I didn’t want to be president when I was little,” Bush told The New York Times over a year ago. “I’m not even sure I wanted to be president when I was big - until recently.”

So for many years, W goofed off, played around, drank too much and partied. His brother Jeb was the responsible one. W cared little for reading, books or intellectuals. Although he went to both Yale and Harvard, he retained a fine suspicion of their pretensions.

That doesn’t mean he is, or was, stupid. For all the jokes about his limited intellectual curiosity, nobody who knows him says he’s a dimwit. The press corps - overwhelmingly liberal - took a shine to him early on in the campaign and did so through to the end. They saw his darting wit, his grinning chumminess, his ability to get along with almost anyone - and sensed their importance.

These may not be functions of a successful nuclear physicist, but they are near-indispensable qualities in a politician. (Nevertheless, even on a purely academic level, Bush got higher marks at Yale than Al Gore did.)

Besides, he won the election. We are now accustomed to the argument that Bush didn’t win the national popular vote, that his victory in Florida was besmirched by myriad irregularities, that he won purely because of the political intervention of the Supreme Court. But this misses the deeper point.

Gore, by any measure, should have won this election in a landslide. He had low unemployment, plummeting crime, minimal inflation, unprecedented growth rates, peace abroad and all the advantages of incumbency. He didn’t merely have the wind at his back, he had a full-scale hurricane.

But the alleged doofus from Texas still beat him. And not only did he beat him across the vast swathe of middle America, but he also won Gore’s home state, Tennessee, and clawed back several swing constituencies that Bill Clinton had won over in the 1990s.

In the presidential debates, where Gore’s superior intelligence and experience were supposed to clean Bush’s clock, it was W who emerged as the more confident, stable and intelligent candidate. His ratings went up after each one. Gore’s response was increasingly to play the dirtiest of campaign ploys: racial demagoguery, scaring pensioners and digging up scandal at the last minute.

Despite all but calling Bush a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a granny-basher, a drunk and a moron, Gore still failed. The man who once boasted that he could rip the lungs out of an opponent barely got a scratch on Bush.

And then consider the post-election endgame. Gore did what Gore does best. He took out his palm-

pilot and spent hour after hour strategising legal policy, recount methods and public relations. He dispatched hundreds of lawyers to Florida, leant heavily on his Democratic followers and officials in the state, placed his hopes on the extremely liberal Florida Supreme Court and followed every single nailbiting twist of the saga.

What did Bush do? After an early, foolish attempt to play public relations, he soon realised what was up and disappeared to his ranch in Texas.

Bush delegated the Florida mess to a couple of old hands, front man James Baker and lawyer Ted Olson, and took refuge in the flatlands of Texas. He was criticised, as usual, for being out of it, overwhelmed, out of his depth, and so on. But was he?

By the end of the drama, his side fought just as hard as Gore’s, but W’s delegation of the nitty-gritty helped keep him away from the collateral damage. He knew that, if he won, he would need to come to his new task mud-free. And so he did. Where Gore looked exhausted and frazzled by the end, Bush looked dignified, even fresh. Was this a function of dumb luck or clever strategy? Those who have followed W from the beginning suspect the latter.

This is the one strong recurring theme in Bush’s career: he is far too easily discounted. We’ve all done it. I thought John McCain, his rival for the Republican nomination, would eat him for breakfast after winning the New Hampshire primary. Wrong. Bush got his act together and sent McCain packing in South Carolina and beyond. From the spring onwards, W was a model of a disciplined politician. He stayed on message throughout. He framed his campaign around the slogan “compassionate conservatism” and purloined a raft of proposals that were straight out of Clinton’s New Democratic playbook.

Bush saw education reform as his priority. He wanted a tax cut for all citizens. He proposed a modest new prescription drug entitlement for the elderly. He pledged to restore military power and return dignity to the Oval Office. He made these points, in almost the same order, over and over again. Even last Wednesday night, he reiterated his policy proposals, like a Buddhist reciting a mantra.

For some this looked like a clever ruse to hide the fact that he didn’t know enough to explore these issues in any complexity or depth. But for others he was merely a politician who understood that success depended on simplicity of message and tireless repetition. By the end of the campaign, voters knew what they were getting. Many were unimpressed, but few were confused. Gore, on the other hand, was all over the map - his intelligence eventually becoming a handicap almost as damaging as his condescending tone and grating style.

What didn’t happen was almost as important as what did. The Republicans, for one thing, didn’t fall apart. Somehow, Bush managed to unite his ideologically fractured and rudderless party.

It had been adrift since 1990, when Bush’s father signed a tax increase into law and ignited a brushfire revolt among Republican hardliners. These hardcore conservatives were as critical to Bush senior’s defeat in 1992 as Tory Eurosceptics were in destroying John Major five years later. There then followed the aborted revolution of Newt Gingrich and the quixotic attempt to impeach Clinton.

By the end of it, the Republicans, despite contributing enormously to domestic policy in the Clinton years, were widely reviled by the general public and had little to show for their furious partisan energy. They had alienated many middle-class women by their absolutism on abortion. They lost immigrants, especially Hispanics, by their near-nativist rhetoric.

They lost fair-minded centrists with brutal attacks on homosexuals. Their hostility to Democrats became close to pathological. In the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dole simply didn’t have the energy or popularity to overcome these divisions. But W did.

At last August’s convention, Bush made all the right symbolic gestures. He packed the platform with blacks and Hispanics. He gave a coveted primetime speaking slot to the only openly gay Republican congressman, Jim Kolbe.

Bush’s speech was a deft, modest, but uplifting talk about the importance of faith and humility and compassion. Nevertheless, he seemed lost at times. When he walks onto a stage, he has a curious habit of pursing his lips tightly, holding his arms too close to his body, blinking nervously and strutting a little too neatly.

His first post-election news conference was a disaster. He was the stereotypical Bambi in front of headlights - confused and seemingly frightened. Even his largely successful acceptance speech last Wednesday was barely above adequate. He still can’t use an Autocue properly. When he tries to say something important, he furrows his eyebrows quizzically, as if he’s confused.

At the same time, there is an almost preternatural mildness about the man, a warm grin, a permanent twinkle in his currant-bun eyes. Some speakers overwhelm you - like Thatcher. W’s very lack of skill somehow invites the audience to lean in, hope for the best and egg him on. It is this combination of mildness in manner and policy that will surely be the hallmark of his presidency.

His father, former president Bush, coined the phrase “a kinder, gentler nation”, but he was not very adept at conveying it. He was too stiff, too reserved, too formal to win over ordinary Americans. Bush, in contrast, is at ease with people. He has gay friends and black friends. He seems perfectly at ease among capable adult women. He has few class inhibitions. He comes up with nicknames for members of the press corps and teases them relentlessly. In all this, he is strikingly like JFK, confident in his masculinity, irreverent with authority figures, genuinely engaging. It may be hard to see this from a distance. But Dubya has some of Clinton’s charm without his conniving. He’s not a seducer like Clinton. He’s an engager.

This engagement also includes his political opponents. On Tuesday, in the most important post-election meeting between two candidates since Jimmy Carter met Gerald Ford in the wake of their bitter campaign, Dubya will meet Gore. If both men behave as impeccably as they did in their concession and acceptance speeches, all will be fine. But Bush is especially good at magnanimity. He has patched things up with McCain, who recently spoke highly of his former opponent to me.

In Texas, Bush is famous for having more in common with many Democrats than with members of his own party. To be sure, Texas Democrats are a more conservative breed than their Washington equivalents, but Bush’s success was still notable. Last Wednesday night, he pointedly asked a Democrat to introduce him before his acceptance speech. Within a day of becoming president-elect, Bush had spoken to Clinton and even to Jesse Jackson, a man who has shamelessly described Bush’s victory as an affront to (allegedly) disenfranchised blacks. Bush even told Clinton that he was looking forward to working with his wife, now a New York senator, in the next few years. How’s that for reaching out?

Whatever else these gestures suggest, they surely don’t imply that Bush intends to run a hardline, divisive Republican government. And then look at the first sure intimations of what Bush’s cabinet could look like. The one appointment that looks all but inevitable is Colin Powell as secretary of state. Quite how this former general is qualified for such a position is beyond me, but the symbolism is unmistakable. Instantly, Bush will have appointed the highest black official in America’s history.

By his side will be Condoleeza Rice, a black woman who will almost certainly serve as national security adviser. She will also instantly become the most influential black woman in government in the history of the United States. And this from a man who won far fewer black votes than even Bob Dole in 1996.

Just as important as Powell’s and Rice’s race is their politics. Powell is a “pro-choice” believer in abortion rights and racial preferences. Rice is a moderate internationalist, with few fire-breathing conservative credentials. They will get easy confirmation from the Senate. And they will send a deeply inclusive message to the country. Word has also leaked out of plans for Bush to appoint several big Democratic names - and former presidential candidates - either to the cabinet or to commissions on tax reform or social security.

In fact, if one were to make one sure prediction for Bush’s first term in office, it is that he will be savaged first by his own party. A small group of Republicans, calling themselves the Issues Management Center, are gearing themselves to lobby for more conservative policy initiatives, like big tax cuts and privatisation of social security.

Bush has a good answer for these people. He will refer to the bitter divisions of the past few months and especially weeks and argue that the only firm mandate he has is for national unity. He will point to an evenly divided Senate and the need to get uncontroversial, centrist appointees confirmed. He will say that the only way to keep the House of Representatives Republican in 2002 is by pursuing the kind of bipartisan approach Kennedy tried in 1960 and Ford did in 1974.

If Bush is a moderator and an engager, he is also, above everything, a delegator. We’ve seen this now so profoundly that it’s a sure bet Bush will hand many of his most difficult tasks to people he trusts. When he trusts someone, he lets him do the job and sticks with him. There are very few embittered former employees of George W Bush. His campaign staff - the guru Karl Rove, the bulldog spokeswoman Karen Hughes - have been with him throughout. Rove is the new Dick Morris, Hughes a platonic version of Hillary. At the centre of the organisational wheel is Dick Cheney, a man Bush picked for vice-president because he knew he’d need him in the event he won. Cheney surely wasn’t selected for his campaigning skill. But his experience of no fewer than five presidential transitions is an invaluable asset in the current pell-mell attempt to form an administration in half the time usually assigned.

Cheney is a grown-up of immense experience. He was Ford’s chief-of-staff. He was defence secretary for the Gulf war. The man knows what he’s doing. In the past few months he has even been the virtual front man for the new administration: the public image, the spokesman, the work dog, the facilitator.

All this, plus Cheney’s heart condition, has led Washington wags to argue that George W Bush is a heartbeat away from the presidency. But if you wanted a sense of ballast in these turbulent times, it would be hard to think of anyone more suited for the task than Cheney.

At times, the delegation is almost pathological on Bush’s part. Again, it’s worth taking a brief look at how he ran his post-campaign campaign. A week ago, he was asked what he felt about the latest legal rulings. He said that if his legal team was fine with them, he was too. You can either see this as a scary detachment from events, or a remarkably cool ability to delegate under even the tensest of conditions.

The problem will come, of course, when Bush has two trusted advisers at war with one another, when the decision has to rest on his own shoulders. The only clue we have to this scenario is the Texas governorship, where he governed through consensus and charm; and the presidential campaign, when disputes were kept remarkably under wraps and tough decisions made without apparent chaos.

Above all, the decisions when they came were quick, simple and largely irreversible - like the early legal decision last month to oppose hand counts anywhere in Florida. The contrast with the past few years could not be more acute. Where Clinton never really allowed any true equals in his cabinet, delegated little and deliberated into the early hours, Bush has surrounded himself with people far more qualified than he is, makes decisions swiftly and goes to bed early.

He appears to have few illusions about himself, and he has made a virtue of a past that was not at first glance an obvious training for the presidency.

Dubya was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven; but his father took the family to Midland, a small oil town in Texas. The children had an idyllic life of local public school, little league baseball games, a doting mother and a distant father trying to succeed in the oil business.

George W was funny, reckless and popular. He went back east to a prep school and then to Yale, where he was president of his fraternity. He spent his student years drinking, partying and playing. He hated what he saw as pretentious liberal intellectuals and he failed to understand what the political turmoil of the 1960s was all about.

Confronted with the possibility of having to go to the Vietnam war, he managed to join the Texas National Guard, where he was safe from the fighting. (Cheney took student deferments to avoid the draft. He once explained that he had “other priorities”.)

What Dubya has called his “irresponsible youth” lasted until he was 40 years old. He almost certainly used drugs but he has never explicitly owned up to this. Indeed, apart from confessing to a drink-driving charge that was leaked on the eve of the presidential election, he has revealed little beyond giving a not unattractive impression of being a reformed sinner.

His drinking problem seemed to arise from a lack of focus in his life, even after he returned to Midland in his twenties to follow his father into the oil industry. There are stories of a slobbish Dubya living in a shed that was described as a “toxic wasteland” by a friend. He wore little but jeans and T-shirts, and the wives of his friends did his washing.

The boozing continued despite marriage. His wife Laura, a librarian, put up with long absences at night with other oilmen in the country clubs and city bars around Midland. Bush can be wry about the legend that has built up that “I’m the wildest man that ever lived”. He was “not clinically an alcoholic”, according to his own assessment. He didn’t get into fights and he never drank during the day, or even every day.

The problem seems to have been that when he did drink, he did so to excess. “Alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people,” he has said.

He seemed to be a failure. But at some point in the mid-1980s he pulled himself together with Laura’s help. At a family gathering, he sought out Billy Graham, the evangelist, and conversed with him about faith. After one particularly heavy night of drinking, soon after his 40th birthday, he suddenly stopped and hasn’t had a drop since. He joined a Bible study class and found his way back.

Money and a dizzying political career followed. He sold his unsuccessful oil company in a very sweet deal (there were rumours that the purchasers wanted to put a Bush on their board) and eventually made $15m by investing in the Texas Rangers baseball team.

He had already dabbled unsuccessfully in politics, and the new sober Bush was becoming a potential force in the state. In 1994 he astonished his family by wresting the Texan governorship from Ann Richards, the popular Democratic incumbent. She was the first powerful political to make the mistake of underestimating Dubya.

Bush today is also a relatively quiet man. This has something to do with his famous difficulties with the English language, a form of mild dyslexia that should not be confused with stupidity. But it is also a matter of style. As I have written here before, Bush is essentially a hedgehog. When threatened, he curls into a defensive ball. He retreats. During the enormously tense and corrosive time when Gore was putting the country and the world through the post-election legal wringer, Bush went home to the ranch. He said almost nothing.

There were still pictures, reminiscent of LBJ, of a man in a cowboy hat throwing sticks for his dog, Spot. The most eloquent expression of his inner turmoil was the boil that suddenly emerged on his face and required a plaster to cover it. The rest was silence. During that time, Bush’s ratings only went up.

He is in this respect the antidote to Clinton. For eight years, we had a president who couldn’t shut up. He talked and talked and talked and said almost nothing memorable. There was no settled home for Clinton (he had always lived in government housing), little private zone, and what was private was mainly X-rated.

And yet suddenly we have this deeply inarticulate man, sometimes shy of the limelight, on a ranch where he seems obviously at peace, with no cable television and three hours’ drive from his office. The contrast is almost as overwhelming as the relief.

Last week was the same. The day after his acceptance speech, Bush stayed at home. He didn’t give the traditional victory press conference, he didn’t go to his campaign headquarters, he didn’t even work out. The hedgehog remained curled. He won’t arrive in Washington until this evening.

Is he up to it? Who knows. His narrowest of victories suggests that the American people aren’t sure either. But the president-elect is a man of far greater stature than the man who began his campaign two years ago. We compare him unfavourably to Clinton now, but we forget how chaotic Clinton’s first few months were.

Bush has governed a far bigger state than Clinton ever did. He has won more votes than Clinton ever did. He won the presidency in the wake of a boom, not a recession. And unlike Clinton, he is surrounded by men and women deeply familiar with the ways of American government and the world. His life is not a work of improvisation. His marriage is not a political arrangement. He loathes disorder, while Clinton thrived on it. He delegates where Clinton micro-managed.

Above all, Bush knows his own limitations, while Clinton constantly tested his own. We barely know Bush’s two daughters because he has protected their privacy with a determination and doggedness that suggests he knows what the meaning of privacy is. For some, this seems like insecurity. To me, it looks like the opposite.

For Britain, too, there is some reason for optimism. Bush is not known for being an Anglophile, but he is not an Anglophobe either. His foreign policy team combines two features: traditionalism and prudence.

While mindful of the importance of economic diplomacy, the Bush team does not adhere too easily to the nostrums that economic interdependence has somehow superseded the importance of solid military defence and alliances. Bush repeated often his belief that the purpose of military force is not to install governments, repair economies or promote trade, but to fight and win wars.

With Powell at the State Department, there will not be an isolationist foreign policy, but there will surely be a rollback of some of America’s more ambitious overseas nation-building commitments. At the same time, there is likely to be a reassertion of the importance of America’s oldest allies, especially the British, after a period of relative neglect.

Expect renewed interest in relations with Latin America and a more aggressive attempt to expand freer trade. But this is unlikely to come at the expense of more traditional diplomacy and geopolitics. Whatever else Cheney, Powell and Rice are, they are not dreamers. They are realists.

In his acceptance speech last Wednesday, Bush reiterated his belief that everything happens for a reason. The path he has taken to the presidency has been a truly odd one. He started with a sense of inevitability, stumbled, regained his footing, stumbled again into a photo finish, and then by some judicial acrobatics made it to the White House.

To win the presidency must be a life-changing experience. To apparently lose it, win it, lose it, then win it again - all in the space of five weeks - is something nobody else has ever experienced. It says something about George W Bush that he hasn’t been emotionally unhinged by the experience. But hedgehogs are resilient, if nothing else. And in politics, to the statesman’s eyes, everything is an opportunity, and deep weakness is often the springboard for strength.

Without these past five weeks, Bush would have been seen forever as a minority president - the second-place finisher who was awarded the gold medal. But after this ordeal, he seems like the perfect man for the moment. He is a conciliator where we need conciliation. He is a quiet man when we need restraint. He is a new face when the old ones have cracked with bitterness and exhaustion.

The election exposed some awful problems in America’s electoral machinery and some deep divisions in the American polity. But these are acute difficulties that also present a unique opportunity for renewal. America, after all, is a country that has never been perfect but has yet never given up on the possibility of perfection - and that paradox is why it never rests and never will.

George W Bush now has a chance to see how he, in his turn, can heal this forever opening and closing breach. There is a crack in everything, as Lou Reed once wrote. It’s how the light gets in.

DICK CHENEY - VICE PRESIDENT

Cheney, 59, is the president-elect’s ‘safe pair of hands’. A consummate Washington insider, he has served under three presidents and rose, during the administration of Bush’s father, to the position of defence secretary, when he directed two of the largest military campaigns in recent history - the invasion of Panama and the Gulf war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. His life in the public eye began in 1969, when he joined the Nixon administration as a junior White House official. He became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff before winning a seat in Congress, where he was renowned for a conservative voting record. He married Lynne, his childhood sweetheart, in 1964 and she became a distinguished Washington figure in her own right as director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a post she used at the height of the so-called ‘culture wars’ to combat political correctness in the classroom. A portly, bespectacled figure, Cheney has suffered several heart attacks, most recently during the post-election standoff when surgeons intervened with angioplasty

THE IRON TRIANGLE

Karl Rove, senior adviser - chief political strategist in the campaign and nicknamed ‘Bush’s brain’. A former aide to George Bush Sr, he has known Dubya since the mid-1970s, when he advised him during his first, failed political campaign - a run for Congress in 1978. He is known as much for his aggressive political tactics as for a habit of unexpectedly breaking into song

Joe Albaugh, senior adviser - Albaugh, Rove and Karen Hughes are the ‘iron triangle’ of advisers closest to Bush. Albaugh, 48, has been his chief of staff in Texas. At 6ft 4in, he is an imposing figure referred to by Bush as the ‘big stick’

Karen Hughes, deputy chief of staff - After Laura, Bush’s wife, Hughes is said to be the best at reading his thoughts. A former television journalist, she handled press relations in Texas for Ronald Reagan’s second presidential campaign before becoming executive director of the state’s Republican party. She served as Bush’s chief spokesman during the race and was accompanied everywhere by her 13-year-old son, who was ‘home-schooled’ in between campaign stops

Don Evans, commerce secretary - Dubya’s closest friend and chairman of his presidential campaign. They have attended Bible classes together, played lots of golf and supported each other in difficult times

Condoleeza Rice, national security adviser - brought up in a segregated town in Alabama, she dreamt of being a concert pianist but came to prominence as a Soviet specialist for Bush’s father

Colin Powell, secretary of state - chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the Gulf war and one of America’s most popular figures. Since 1993 he has dedicated himself to a charity for underprivileged children

Andrew Card, chief of staff - former car industry lobbyist who served both Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr in the White House. Amiable and efficient, his biggest asset is loyalty to the Bush clan