SHRUB: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.

SHRUB: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush

By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose Random House, $19.95

The record is slim

EVERY NIGHT GEORGE W. BUSH SHOULD get down on his knees and thank the Lord that his father was born before he was. That is the inevitable conclusion of Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. Before big business and Bush found each other, the governor himself admitted that he was "all name and no money."

All his adult life, Bush has been an influence peddler--trading on his father's name. In quid pro quo fashion, Bush the younger found rich family friends or those seeking political access who were eager to find him a berth in that lily-white bastion for Vietnam draft avoiders, the National Guard, subsidize his baseball team, bail out his failing oil businesses, and drop fat checks into his political coffers.

Recounting Bush's flops and bail outs--most of the oil money was raised during the time his father was running for president or was vice president--Ivins writes, "As predictably as the hero would pull the damsel off the railroad tracks in The Perils of Pauline, another investor showed up to save Dubya's ass." As one hapless investor said, "He knew everybody in the United States who was worth knowing."

Since Shrub was written by Molly Ivins, the wise and witty political columnist, it is often very funny but she and her co-author Lou Dubose have backed up the barbs with research and citations to investigative articles by other members of the media.

Writes Ivins about George W: "He owes his political life to big corporate money: He's a CEO's wet dream. He carries their water ... George W. Bush is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America...." You don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to figure out that most of his time as governor was spent greasing the way for big business, or "bidness," Ivins' phrase that gets her in trouble with eastern establishment critics. But her ear is always correct: Texans do say "bidness" and they also pronounce Bush the Younger's middle initial as "Dubya," her frequent sobriquet.

An Oily Past

Shrub is a prescient primer for followers of his presidential campaign. This goes not only for interested voters but for the establishment media, many of whom mindlessly fawned over him. The book demonstrates that Bush paid scant attention to the nuts and bolts process of governing, never was averse to bragging and taking the reward for the achievements of others, and never was a stranger to below-the-belt distortions in campaign speeches and ads. We can expect more of the same as this campaign unfolds.

Although crime went down during Ann Richard's governorship, for example, Bush capitalized on a slight rise in juvenile crime and ran an ad campaign depicting an apparently real-life incident of a helpless female being beaten by two masked muggers. Turns out it was the creation of an ad man. But with a caption denouncing Richards, it went over big.

Ivins gives Bush high marks in one category--his devotion to improving public education--but she is apoplectic about him taking credit for much that he didn't do. The push to toughen up a system that allowed the promotion of students with unsatisfactory grades had begun months before he took office. Some of the credit belongs to Ross Perot, appointed to a previous education task force, and his "no pass, no play" get tough attack on uneducated athletes.

As for compassionate conservatism, his laughable slogan, "A Reformer with Results" belies the truth. He proudly runs on a record that most politicians would want to run from. "[I]s the air cleaner since I became governor? ... the answer is yes," trumpeted Bush last May, giving new meaning to the word chutzpah. This was a "perverse distortion of reality" because Bush is, "to put it mildly, part of the problem," writes Ivins. He personally intervened to protect major air polluters and appointed alleged environmental watch dogs who were "staggeringly dreadful," including one who worked for the Monsanto Chemical Company for three decades, and then became a lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council. Texas air and water pollution is rated the worst in the nation and Texas leads all states in recognized carcinogens in the air. In a twofer of particularly smarmy proportions, Bush cronies made a mockery of campaign finance reform by shelling out $2.5 million in anti-McCain ads in New York, California, and Ohio. Totally unhinged from reality, the ads accused McCain of anti-environmental positions--even though Bush is by far the greater polluter of the two.

Texas is also number one in executions. Macho George went out of his way to make a "savagely punitive system" worse. This includes tightening already draconian laws covering juvenile delinquents, opposing drug treatment programs, and executing the mentally retarded. According to polls, even this death-penalty loving state doesn't take kindly to executing people with I.Q.s of 60.

A further examination of this compassionate conservative's "achievements": The state also is number one in the number of people who lack health insurance: a full quarter of the population. Last year, writes Ivins, "Bush attempted to bar 200,000 children from a low-cost federal-state health-insurance program and discourage poor children from receiving free health care to which they are entitled under federal law." At the same time "he was personally flogging the only bill he designated `emergency legislation': a $45 million tax break which he sold as a "benefit for only the owners of `itty bitty' oil wells. Turned out that most of the marginal wells were owned by Exxon."

Meanwhile, this "compassionate conservative" opposed hate-crime legislation (even after Texas' vicious dragging murder of a black man) and supported bills to ban gay adoptions.

When it comes to bucking big business, the little guy is treated with even more contempt. While campaigning last year, Bush told a disadvantaged Baltimore youth that raising the minimum wage was a "bad idea." It will come as no surprise to Shrub readers that Bush recently vowed that he would be a tort-reform president and would not have sought an investigation of Bill Gates and Microsoft. At every opportunity he put tort reform--which insulates the corporate world from lawsuits filed by consumers, injured workers, or the survivors of those killed by negligence or malice--on the Texas legislature's fast track. Eventually, his tighter-than-a-tick alliance with big business has paid off with a $60 million war chest (mostly spent before Super Tuesday) that made it possible for him to forgo matching federal funds and their restrictions while (chutzpah again) calling himself the "real" reformer.

Ivins regards one Bush business deal as smelly as the air over Texas. He unloaded his stock in his failing oil business "before news of the company's precarious health was made public." U.S. News & World Report noted that there was "substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew" that the company was "in dire straits." Although insiders liquidating large blocks of stock are required to notify the Securities and Exchange Commission immediately, Bush did not report the sale until eight months after the federal deadline. The requirements he violated are "intended to stop board members from bailing out and leaving less informed stockholders holding an empty bag--which is exactly what he did," observes Ivins.

"If Bush does make it to the White House, he and Laura should have Ken Start over for dinner," she reasons. If Starr's abuse of power hadn't so tainted the independent-counsel office, Congress might have reauthorized the statute. Thus "leaving the door open for a court-appointed prosecutor to investigate a president's son who flipped his oil companies faster than a Texas S&L can daisy-chain a Dallas condo." Bush "walked away from the whole mess with more money than Bill Clinton ever dreamed of making on a little real estate deal known as Whitewater."

President Dubya

As for Bush, the presidential candidate, this book is not a prognosticator in one area--the political roller coaster ride that he's already given the country. Ivins gives the affable Bush credit for political smarts, and she views Bush as a competitor who should not be underestimated. If he should stumble, Karl Rove, his long time consultant and current campaign honcho known as "Bush's brain", is by his side to recast his words and image.

But evidently Texas is not a training camp for national elections. Ivins cites as George's shrewdest political move his careful wooing of the Hispanic vote in the blighted Rio Grande Valley, even though he has thrown them mere bones--despite $10 billion budget surpluses in 1997 and 1998. Concludes Ivins, "the record is wildly different from the rhetoric." The compassion candidate is photographed hugging little brown kids and reading to little black kids but Ivins can't find "any evidence that he's done anything at all as governor that would make any differences in their lives, except to make it harder."

As for religion, Bush says he was saved from his wild ways by Billy Graham, another O.F.F. (old family friend). But his convenient political conversion to the Christian right came when that coalition won control of the Texas Republican party. It took political savvy, writes Ivins, to appeal to both the religious right and secular Country Club Republicans. For example, before general audiences, Bush ducked the fact that he wants a constitutional amendment on abortion, a position dear to the religious right.

Bush thought he could keep on dissembling until he got the nomination, but McCain, the feisty spoiler, began to lob mortars ("in coming" as they said in Vietnam) and forced Bush to move even further right.

So where were the political smarts in South Carolina? One would have thought Bush had been advised by Gore/Bradley to wrap himself in the confederate flag and to make that unseemly crawl to Bob Jones University, somehow thinking he could avoid the flap that ensued over the institution's racial and Catholic bias. (Only to be followed with a politically induced belated apology to Cardinal John O'Connor in which Bush reminded his eminence that he is a long-time friend of the family.)

God knows it took an alchemist's skill to turn McCain, the card-carrying self-avowed Reaganite, into a dangerous liberal, as Bush succeeded in doing with Republican voters in South Carolina. And Bush kept the liberal blitz up, cornering the Republican vote by capitalizing on such McCain performances as ripping into tobacco companies and televangelist extremists like Pat Robertson. But when Bush gets the nomination, that dog won't hunt, as they say in Texas; he is damaged goods.

Heaven Help Us

As early as 1993, writes Ivins, Rove groomed Bush, ordering him to stick to the script, and to stay "on message." That rote-like coaching continues, with a reading list of books and titles, foreign and domestic affairs advisors (many from Daddy's network) and "on message" edicts which have improved his debate performances. When Bush flies solo we get "Kosovarians," "full exposure" for full disclosure, and such hilarious mixed metaphors as John McCain "can't take the high horse and claim the low road."

Ivins ponders a point that should be examined by any voter seeking enlightenment. "From the record it appears that he doesn't know much, doesn't do much and doesn't care much about governing. The exception is a sustained effort on education with only mixed results. In fact, given his record, k's kind of hard to figure out why he wants a job where he's expected to govern." Why, indeed. Bush promises to do for America what he has done for Texas. Heaven help America.

This is a slim book (179 pages). But then Bush has a slim record. As Ivins and Dubose write, if readers find Bush's resume "a little light, don't blame us. There's really not much there there. We have been looking for six years."

MYRA MACPHERSON, the author of three books, was a long-time political writer for The Washington Post.