Word: bush
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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George W. Bush knows the question is coming. He is sitting in the back of a silver Ford Windstar minivan, his compact frame unfurled across the bench seat, his left arm slung across the backrest. He appears completely relaxed, but when the question arrives--the one about whether he has the intellectual wherewithal to be President and whether it bothers him that this issue keeps being raised in the campaign--his body tenses. He turns his face forward, his eyes narrow, and he gazes out the windshield at the long road ahead. "You know," Bush says, his voice tinny...
...Bush may be right about the American people. In 1992 voters threw his father out of office in favor of a Democrat with a potent intellect and an encyclopedic command of everything from GATT to the gap in wages. But Americans learned that Bill Clinton has far less command over his character, and that may have left them with a yearning for a less complicated President. In Texas, Bush is known as a skilled manager and a confident, crisp decision maker. He has pursued, for the most part, simple, understandable policy goals and has stuck to his agenda with remarkable...
...Texas Governor's brain is that he is much smarter, at least in terms of raw, innate aptitude, than he lets on. When his purloined college transcript from Yale was published in the New Yorker last week, the news only confirmed what we'd already expected and what Bush had once suggested--that he had been a mediocre, C-average student. The surprise was that Bush's SAT scores, while not topping the charts, were better than his grades. (Out of a possible top score of 800, Bush got 566 on the verbal part of the test...
...Bush speaks convincingly about how important it is for a leader to assemble a trustworthy cadre of advisers. And he argues that there is no percentage, as Governor or as President, in trying to master every subject or micromanage every decision. But as Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, says, "Bush is trying to turn his weakness into a virtue. He's not a policy wonk, so he has to rely on people who are." And there is a risk to that approach, adds Buchanan, who is an admirer: "Bush's biggest weakness...
...Bush's grasp of the details and nuance of some domestic-policy issues--especially education--draws praise from experts around the country. He can also talk substantively and passionately about trade and immigration, two areas of "foreign policy" he encountered as Governor of a state that shares a 900-mile border with Mexico. Bush proved as much in Sioux City, Iowa, where he took a vague question from the crowd to deliver a message of compassion toward illegal immigrants. "I want to remind you of something about immigration," Bush told his nearly all-white audience. "Family values do not stop...