BRIAN McGRORY

Fresh face amid stale politics

By Brian McGrory, Globe Staff, June 15, 1999

NEW CASTLE, N.H. -- He stood at the podium with an amused look on his face, stood under a white tent at what could have been an old-fashioned revival meeting. And for a few enlightening moments yesterday morning, you began to understand why it is that Democrats live in mortal fear of a politician with the relatively benign name of George W. Bush.

Like him or not, Bush is fresh. Vice President Al Gore seems so irreversibly stale. Bush is mischievous. Gore is gratingly straight. Bush is dynamic. Gore seems stuck in a time -- the era of Clinton scandal -- that voters would rather forget.

Coming into his first telling trip of a long primary campaign, the fear among local Republicans was that Bush would seem overly programmed, that every self-important adviser out of Washington would have wrung the personality out of a politician who otherwise glows in the presence of cameras and voters.

No. In New Hampshire just a few minutes, he wrapped his arm around the shoulder of activist Ruth Griffin, pointed to her cowboy boots and yelled in his Texas twang, "My kind of girl." Kneeling between a pair of tow-headed schoolkids, he said to nearby cameramen, "I'm always preening."

Later, spying ever-unctuous CNBC commentator Chris Matthews at a press conference, Bush called from the stage, "It's good to see the larger personalities are starting to show up."

He is both a force and a freak of political nature, an overwhelming front-runner in a campaign in which he's barely had time to ask for a vote. The public doesn't yet know him, and what people knew of his father, they didn't seem to like.

And when he outlines his vision for the nation's future, he speaks in only the broadest of terms, raising such themes as "compassionate conservatism," and saying that no American should be left behind. Some staunch conservatives flinch at such liberal-leaning talk, but the rank and file partisans don't seem to mind. And for good reason.

In the Washington of 1999, Republicans hate Democrats and Democrats hate Republicans. Accomplishment isn't measured in new laws, but in successful political jabs. President Clinton blames House Republicans for his ethical problems because of his inability to blame himself. House Republicans blame Clinton for a national stalemate out of a moronically miscalculated belief that fault is what voters want.

And along comes Bush. In Texas, he refused to utter a negative word in his upset victory over incumbent Governor Ann Richards in 1994, then worked so closely with Democratic legislators to pass his first-term program that he was loath to campaign against them in last year's state elections.

"I know you can't lead by dividing people, pitting one against another," Bush said yesterday. "I don't like the trash-mouthed politics of the past."

I met Bush in 1995, when he was a new governor and thoughts of any higher office took voice only in the dreamy whispers of his most ambitious aides. Failing to get an interview, I attended his public events near Dallas one day. As he headed for the airport, he stopped and asked why I'd been following him.

Within minutes, I was in the back of his sedan, then rumbling above the Texas hill country in his state-issue plane as he stretched out with a bottle of water in his hand waxing about politics and life. After touchdown, he cleared his afternoon schedule, and after a lengthy interview, invited me to the governor's mansion for a personal tour.

He was self-aware, while most politicians are simply self-absorbed, unguarded to the point of being refreshing. He talked without the benefit of aides or any overt caution, joked about his golf game (a country club swing, public course handicap, he said), his love for his mother, the deafening bus stop outside his house. His laugh echoed off his office walls.

No more, such liberties. More than 100 reporters accompanied Bush from Austin to Iowa to New Hampshire, on a campaign trip that resembled the throes of a general election and a traveling operation as sophisticated as that of the White House.

None of this qualifies him to be president. There are issues to prod, proposals to flesh out, a background to explore. Those who claim that a candidate with the name of George Walker would never be a front-runner raise a valid point.

But like him or not, agree with him or not, Bush will add a sense of civility badly needed in a national campaign. After too many fund-raising scandals, too many lies, too many bombs lobbed over partisan lines, he is a welcome sight for an electorate that has grown too accustomed to negative news.