HILADELPHIA - Thanks to the political alchemy that transforms nominees at conventions, George W. Bush casts a longer shadow today than he did yesterday.
For those who graduated with him from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1964, as I did, his new stature astounds - not for the shock of his potential presidency, but for what it says about the rest of us.
''One of us now has his hands on the instruments of power. To admit that he could be president is to admit that we're not kids anymore,'' says class secretary Tom Seligson. ''It reminds me that I'm supposed to retire 10 years from now.''
Bill Clinton may have been the first boomer president, but Bush could be the first one we watched swing a broomstick at a tennis ball.
''I went to Florida with the guy over spring break,'' recalls Seligson. ''You think to yourself, `What did I miss?' The mythology of the presidency is that no one I know that well could end up there. Then you realize that's not true anymore.''
With his acceptance speech last night, Bush closed the book on the first volume of his own history.
Gone will be the media obsession with his early life. How he got here is instantly less interesting than where he is going. His smirk is just a smirk. His reign as High Commissioner of Stickball at Andover no longer matters. What does is the fine print of his plan to save Social Security.
The acceptance speech was the ultimate grown-up act. He now becomes a Rorschach test for the rest of us: How we feel about him depends on how we feel about ourselves.
''You start with amazement and say, `Wait a minute, why is this guy going so far and so many of us haven't?''' says Seligson. ''Then you step back and realize that a lot of us have done fine in our own ways. So you can look at it as `Why him and not me?' or you can look at him as a reflection of me in the Andover context. Either way, it takes a lot to do what he's done.''
Randall Roden, an old friend of Bush's who attended elementary school in Midland, Texas, and later Andover with Bush, notes the inherent silliness of trying to identify, three decades after the fact, the traits at Andover that explain Bush's current success.
''If anyone had asked you back then if George would become president, you'd have said, `Hell, no,''' says Roden. ''But that would have been equally true if you were in Bill Clinton's class. I have come to accept George's success only because he has demonstrated abililties I didn't know he had.''
These are defined and validated externally. He is a social animal who needs others to burnish his own identity.
''His skills involve interaction, reaction, counterpunching,'' adds Roden, a North Carolina trial lawyer. ''It is not as if he has an overarching vision for America.''
Reporters have gotten lost in Bush's years at Andover. It's easy to do. With the wrong context, you draw the wrong judgments, and different players limn very different versions of that experience.
For example, one writes about George's defiant antiintellectualism at his peril, warns Roden.
''That part you can overdo,'' he says. ''I think he is smart and intuitive. On the other hand, George probably sees a limited range of possibilities.''
Bush's politics at Andover were subterranean, if they existed at all. In that sense, he was no different from the rest of us. Until his run against Kent Hance for an open congressional seat in West Texas in 1978, he appeared largely apolitical.
If he was conservative, it was in his lifestyle, not his politics.
But, it turns out, something was percolating within. ''It's not so surprising now,'' says Roden.
''When we look back on it, he was developing skills that were not apparent at the time. I should have realized it sooner because he was involved in other people's campaigns.''
In the end, Bush has emerged as a fairly uncomplicated politician. ''I think he is more or less like what he says he is - a Reagan conservative,'' says Roden.
''There is nothing Machiavellian going on there. I wouldn't have known that when we were at Andover.''
But Bush's run for the Oval Office is as surreal to us as it is uncomplicated. Our mental snapshots of the boy, now sepia-toned, vie with video footage of the man.
''You keep pinching yourself,'' says Seligson. ''And every day at work people ask, 'Do you know this guy?'''
