| SHRUB: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush Molly Ivins Lou Dubose New York: Random House, 2000 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-373-56399-4 | 179pp. | HC | $19.95 | |
In this millennial political year 2000 for the United States, a fairly common plaint is that both major candidates for the office of President are probably "in the pockets" of big business and, if not, are still more alike than different so that the choice between them is moot.
The fact, however, is that there are great and significant differences between Albert Gore, Jr. and George W. Bush. It is only that getting at them seems harder in this election cycle than before. But, despair not; for the inimitable Molly Ivins — aided by Lou Dubose, editor of The Texas Observer — condenses the political history of George W. Bush (hereafter known as "Dubya") into a series of short but trenchant chapters on the topics relevant to voters' decisions.
The first chapter deals with Dubya's privileged upbringing, with prep school and Yale degree. It documents how he avoided serving in the Vietnam War through a selective appointment to the Texas Air National Guard1 and goes on to describe his early forays into the political arena, aided by plenty of money raised through family contacts.
Chapter 2 discusses his career in the oil industry. This can fairly be summarized as a succession of losing ventures sustained by other peoples' money. Dubya is not entirely at fault here; the oil business went through several busts during this time, and all the domestic "easy oil" had already been discovered and tapped. But there were shady, if not crooked, deals. Bush survived a succession of company failures, ending with a profit while other, larger investors lost money. And the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was involved at one point. Trenchant quotation #1:
If Bush does make it to the White House, he and Laura should have Ken Starr over for dinner. If Starr hadn't so abused the power of his office, Congress might have reauthorized the independent-counsel statute, 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; as a corporate board insider, unloaded his company stock shortly before its price plummeted; and walked away from the whole mess with more money than Bill Clinton ever dreamed of making on a little real estate deal now known as Whitewater. |
Baseball is the subject of Chapter 3. For $640,000, in 1989, Dubya bought a 2% share of the Texas Rangers. Here, the pattern is much the same as in oil, with the important difference that along with investments from "fat cats", public money was involved. Rangers' management coerced the city of Arlington into passing a half-cent sales tax increase to fund their new baseball stadium. The land for that new ballpark was acquired using the team's quasi-governmental power of eminent domain. As the authors put it on page 39: "The Rangers management went out and made an offer. When landowners refused, the sports authority condemned the property." As you might have guessed, the price paid for the condemned parcels was even less that the low-balled initial offer. In the one example cited, the original owners went to court and eventually recovered their loss. But this settlement came not from the Texas Rangers, but again from public funds. The Rangers became a wealthy franchise, so the clause in Dubya's contract raising his stake to 11% kicked in. When he sold it in 1994, he earned $15.4 million. Trenchant quotation #2:
Hillary Clinton had done a far smaller deal on commodities futures in the 1970s, and the East Coast press stopped just short of appointing its own special prosecutor to look into allegations that she was trading on her influence as the wife of the governor of Arkansas. |
Here in the Great State, the son of a sitting president served as what Mexicans call a prestanombre — a small player who lends his name to a project run by a big player. Our prestanombre got the taxpayers to provide a big chunk of added value to his business, was elected governor, and made a $15 million profit on a $600,000 investment and his family name. |
It makes commodities futures look like peanuts. |
Ann Richards, the governor Bush defeated in 1994, made some mistakes in her campaign, as she now admits. But the "killer issue", according to observers, was guns. Richards had vetoed a "concealed-carry" permit bill in 1993, against strong NRA lobbying. Bush promised to sign it. And so we come to Dubya's political track record, the strongest basis for deciding on his fitness for the presidency of the United States. Here are the topics covered by the authors.
Chapter 5 briefly tells the story of Dubya's conversion to Christianity, at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, on his fortieth birthday. His born-again status has resulted in ties with several Texas "bible-thumpers" and conservative gurus, which the authors describe in entertaining fashion. Politically astute, he panders to right-wing, fundamentalist audiences but delivers only enough to avoid a backlash from them.
The authors persuasively make the case in Chapter 6 that Dubya's true policy priorities are demonstrated by the bills he pushes in the Texas Legislature (the "Lege"). Two of his major efforts have been tort-reform (a code word for making it harder for consumers to sue businesses for negligence or other injury) and the privatization of welfare. This latter program turned into an attempt to hand over the state's entire welfare certification-and-distribution system to Lockheed Martin, the aerospace and defense firm. When this failed, he came back with a Draconian set of restrictions for welfare recipients. He also resisted raising the allowance for a mother with two children from $188 to $201; he wanted the money for tax cuts, but lost on that one. (That's $201 per month; it rockets Texas up the state rankings all the way to 48th.) He also fought to limit eligibility for the state's Children's Health Insurance Program to families at or below 150% of the federal poverty level. Democrats in the Lege wanted to set it at 200%, in accord with most other states. This would have enrolled another 200,000 of Texas' 1.4 million uninsured children. Bush lost that one, too. He prevented the passage of a hate-crimes bill introduced after James Byrd Jr. was brutally chain-dragged to death. (In fairness, the authors admit this was a bad bill; but they claim it was needed for its symbolic value.) But wait; there's more — including:
Put succinctly, the general picture is of someone who rewards big business and the wealthy at the expense of the lower classes.
By the standards of every environmentalist group, Texas has gotten dirtier under Dubya. Trenchant quotation #3:
According to the tri-national North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation, set up by NAFTA, Texas pollutes more than any other state or Canadian province. That record includes air pollution and water pollution. We're number one. |
And according to records kept by the Environmental Defense Fund, Texas is also number one in: |
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And number one in ten other categories of dangerous air pollutants in the environment too. |
Chapter 7 reveals that Dubya's first environmental-policy decision was to remove and replace all three members of the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC) appointed by his Democratic predecessor Ann Richards, making it an agency controlled by the industries it was supposed to regulate. Trenchant quotation #4:
Bush replaced this trio with three white guys so sympathetic to big polluters it left Texas environmentalists whomper-jawed. |
One of them, Barry McBee, as deputy director of the Texas Department of Agriculture, dismantled the pesticide right-to-know regulations it had taken years to establish — thus relieving farmers of the enormous burden of telling farm workers which fields had just been sprayed, so that they could avoid them for the two or three days when their health was at risk. (Should Bush become president, McBee may be tapped to head the EPA.) |
Some other actions of the TNRCC under Bush: It |
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If this last action seems uncharacteristic, it is. Texas had 850 refineries and other industrial plants that were exempted (grandfathered) when the Texas Clean Air Act took effect in 1971, because they were already in operation. It was a consideration meant to allow them time — three or four years, it was assumed — to come into compliance without excessive disruption. Twenty-eight years later, they were no closer to compliance, and producing 36% of the state's total air pollution. Pressure on the TNRCC had been gradually mounting, until it grew impossible to ignore. (A principal reason was the threatened loss of federal highway funds.) But, nothing daunted, Dubya stepped into the breach, preserving the status quo under the guise of a "voluntary compliance" program developed with the aid of two oil-company executives. By 1999, only 28 of the 850 facilities had drafted a plan for compliance, and only three had implemented any corrective measures. That was the year the governor sought to make this program the law of the state. Despite a revolt by Democrats in the Lege, the bill, written by energy-industry lobbyist R. Kinnan Goleman, was passed. Voluntary compliance was now legal. |
Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, and Beaumont-Port Arthur have been placed on the EPA's list of "non-attainment zones" (places with filthy air.) A Houston study found at least 430 deaths per year caused by air pollution, and the Dallas-Fort Worth area — now in "serious non-attainment" — stands to be downgraded to "severe." Meanwhile, Austin, Tyler, San Antonio, and Longview are eligible for the list, but bureaucratic review is still pending. The authors point out cogently that these trends run counter to the environmental success stories achieved by other Republican governors.
This is a bright spot. The authors praise Bush in Chapter 8 for consistent dedication to improving the quality of education in the state. However, they also point out that most of the improvement seen results from programs already in place when he became governor. For example, Bush claims he ended social promotion in Texas. In fact, it was made illegal in 1984; the law allowed local school districts to determine the criteria used to measure students' fitness for promotion. But in the 1999 session of the Lege, Bush changed it to require students to pass the Texas Assessment of Academic Skill. Trenchant quotation #5:
What we have done is make a single annual test the most important event in every young Texan's life. We envision a happy future for shrinks working on "test anxiety syndrome." The message to teacher is "Teach the test," and the message to kids is, "Learn how to pass the test." This is not education. |
Bush also moved too fast on charter schools, with the result that virtually unregulated charter schools proliferated. Scandals happened.
Chapter 9 indicts the governor for making an execrable system worse:
The drug treatment program makes an interesting case study. As designed under Governor Richards in 1991, it was a "back-end" program — treat the junkies just before they leave prison, since the goal is to return them to society with maximum self-discipline — and used the Phoenix House model or therapeutic community approach. Research shows these are the most effective methods. It was administrated not by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, but by the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. In 1994, when Bush took office after campaigning against drug treatment per se, there were 4,261 treatment beds in the Texas prison system, all using the approach described above. By late 1999, the total number of beds had grown to 5,300; but only 800 of these followed the Richards plan. The others used front-end treatment. All the beds were now controlled by the TDCJ, and there was a strong bias against trying to rehabilitate inmates in the first place, since the TDCJ listened to experts who claimed that they would be in denial. The system houses 13,100 people charged solely with possession of marijuana. (The grand total of drug offenders was not given in the book.) But consider that, toting up the population of state prisons and county jails, plus parolees, gives a total inmate population of 545,000. If drug offenders are only a tenth of that — unlikely given the War on Drugs — it still means only one in ten gets treatment. Without sufficient resources, the noblest effort looks like failure.
This chapter uses a lot of words, a few outrageous decisions, and some (perhaps carefully selected) quotes from Bush to paint him as a hard-ass, heartless S.O.B. Without going into details on what he calls his "youthful indiscretions", it asks if he has learned nothing about crime and punishment from them. The question is valid; but I think Bush, the father of two teen-age daughters as well as a member of a close multi-generation family, does not deserve this particular rap.
Chapter 10, as you might expect, deals with the quid pro quo of American political life: The substantial contributions from special interests. In this case, the special interests are Texas businesses and the quid pro quo is tort-reform. 'nuff said?
As regards the presidential campaign, Bush said in April 1999 that he favors raising the limit on individual contributions. (Italics in original.)
When seeking the governorship, Dubya assiduously courted the Hispanic vote2 and campaigned extensively in the Valley. After winning, this "cheerleader for NAFTA" never came back. What has the region gotten from his administration? A new bridge across the border for the trucks bringing goods from Mexico, and three new "one-stop" inspection stations to speed their entry. $1.6 million over four years to fund a job-training program lobbied for by Valley Interfaith in the region.
Trenchant quotation #6:
This border region is so desperately in need of public money and infrastructure that one highly regarded Republican state senator called for a "Marshall Plan to save it." But in spite of back-to-back budget surpluses exceeding $10 billion in the 1997 and 1999 legislative sessions, there is no evidence that George W. Bush ever considered a coordinated plan for the Valley or any other stretch of the border. What he wanted was big tax cuts in a state that already ranks fiftieth in per capita state spending. |
This very readable book is stamped with the style of Molly Ivins. She delights in writing "Texian" dialect into her columns, and in homespun, sometimes coarse language. In short, she knows how to call a spade a spade. Her collaboration with Dubose has resulted in a well-researched book which is certainly valuable as one source of information about George W. Bush. It is, however, certainly not definitive. Some chapters focus too much on events before his governorship, while giving the impression that he is remiss for not having corrected them. This in a state which the authors admit has a "weak-governor" structure. The chapter on criminal justice, in particular, seems tainted by a liberal bias, by use of isolated "horrible examples" and possibly by quotes taken out of context. Also, while promising never to mention Bush alleged abuse of drugs and alcohol, the authors drop hints here and there, at one point suggesting that he used cocaine.
I found only one error: On page 116, carbon monoxide is called the principle greenhouse gas. The culprit, of course, is carbon dioxide. (And it is arguable that other substances, though present in smaller amounts in the stratosphere, nevertheless have characteristics which result in greater global warming. But that is a topic for a review of another book.)
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.