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Ivory Tower
Carrying justice
Why is the job of overturning wrongful death penalty convictions being left to a handful of students and academics?
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Dear Mr. Blue
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By Garrison Keillor
[02/29/00]

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What matters is the diffuse yet infinitely bankable perception of his electability -- and that is anything but a quality of his person or his life story. Indeed, the basis of Bush's appeal is not leadership, character or moral suasion (those quaint 19th century propositions) so much as a context-defying mastery of affected mannerisms and expensively leased speech that is indistinguishable from performance art.

W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty By Elizabeth Mitchell Hyperion Books, 370 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush By Molly Ivins with Lou Dubose Random House, 179 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Dubya extends the Bush brand chiefly by his capacity to stay remorselessly "on message" (no matter how daffy the message or how non sequitur the setting); his soothing ability to incant slogans and catch phrases like meditative mantras; his pliant yet strangely expressionless face; and (most eloquently of all) his $70 million-and-counting price tag. Alone among the current leading contenders for the presidency, W. refuses even to pay lip service to the notion of serious campaign finance reform. Despite a hasty and loophole-ridden "me too" proposal to curtail soft money on the eve of the South Carolina primary vote, he is actually on record proposing that current limits for individual campaign contributions be increased.

It's not hard to see why. Without generous and enveloping tidal infusions of cash, it would be hard to descry the George W. story at all. Elizabeth Mitchell, at the outset of "W.: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty," tries halfheartedly to trace an organic basis for W. frenzy in the American electorate. Bush presents himself to Americans "in a fitful dream," she writes, "when they have grown weary of reinventing morality and monitoring the conduct of their leaders." If Bill Clinton was an engaging if morally taxing "buddy" to the American people, she continues, "George W. was even simpler fun. The American people saw him as their golfing partner -- someone easy to spend time with but who lacked the complications of a bosom friend."

There it is in a nutshell: You start off talking probity and leadership in all matters Bushian -- you know, the, uh, vision thing -- and before you know it you're back on the fairway. You can see how, at one level, this might well make for "simpler fun" -- what social relationship is not in fact enormously simplified by boatloads of money? But for the vast, nongolfing American majority, the fitful dream that is Dubya segues a bit too briskly into something like "Bonfire of the Vanities" or "The Great Gatsby."

Indeed, Gatsby's immortal one-liner, "Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can!" could serve both as W.'s campaign slogan and the precis for books such as Mitchell's, which capably but uncritically recounts the strivings of presidential ambition in a stubbornly blank and decentered self. Mitchell was denied access to the candidate himself for the book -- often a literary death sentence for quickie campaign and celebrity bios -- but here the absence of Bush fils is scarcely noticeable, since the candidate himself is so manifestly beside the point. Indeed, much of "W.: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty" is taken up with the story of Bush the elder -- whom Mitchell (a former executive editor of George and hence a master of celebritist hyperbole) unironically dubs "Superman."

And of course that, too, makes perfect sense, since so much of W.'s tale is his father's life repeated in blurrier focus, like those deceptively named and badly animated offshore video knockoffs of Disney blockbusters such as "Aladdin" and "The Lion King." Like his dad, W. graduated from Andover and Yale (though with a distinctly mediocre academic record); like his father, he served a stint as a military pilot (though in the cozening embrace of the Texas National Guard, a vital waystation for sons of privilege skittish about combat duty in Vietnam); like his dad, he pursued a career as a wildcat oilman, though his efforts continually flailed and sputtered out, requiring last-minute bailouts from his father's friends and business contacts -- culminating in a stock sell-off in 1990 that supplied Bush with a handsome $300,000 profit, just two months before the stock price nosedived into oblivion.

As Mitchell notes in her rather ungainly way with metaphor, "throughout his days, George W. would be trailed by the halo and the shadow of his father." (She elsewhere likens the Bush family to "America during the Cold War" and "a highly trained, precision Olympic water ballet team.")

Next page | Can you put "good ol' boy" on your résumé?