2000 Speech Held Clues to Bush’s Approach

It came near the start of George W. Bush’s address to the Republican National Convention four years ago -- a brief description of an obscure American patriot who dismissed his brother’s advice not to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Bush, then governor of Texas, told thousands of Republicans gathered in Philadelphia and millions of others watching his speech at home how Lewis Morris of New York had waved off warnings that he could lose his property.

“Morris, a plain-spoken founder, responded, ‘Damn the consequences, give me the pen,’ ” Bush said. “That is the eloquence of American action.”

Little noticed at the time, Bush’s invocation of the uncelebrated 18th century leader now appears a harbinger of the presidency that would follow, say a number of historians, political scientists and speechwriters.

“Reading back, you can see: Here is a guy who intends to be bold and not incremental or timid -- and by God, that he has been,” said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas who has followed Bush’s political career for years.

“He also said in that speech that he would write ‘not footnotes, but chapters,’ and sure enough, he has -- for better or for worse.”

As Bush prepares to give another acceptance speech Thursday in New York City, political observers will be poised to discern a roadmap for a potential second term.

A variety of analysts now look at the anecdote about Morris and other passages of Bush’s first acceptance speech as signals of a presidency that would be both bolder and more partisan than most had predicted.

Partly because of that more doctrinaire style, they say, the Bush agenda outlined in the 2000 speech has met with mixed success -- with the president passing the income tax cut for all Americans as he promised, failing to advance Social Security reform that had been another top priority and winning sharply divided reviews for his reforms of public schools and Medicare.

Bush delivered his Philadelphia speech, of course, before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks massively reordered priorities for the nation and its commander in chief.

While Bush today is a president preoccupied with national security, candidate Bush’s acceptance speech scarcely mentioned foreign affairs, and then mostly to advocate a system to protect the U.S. from incoming ballistic missiles.

What has been more consistent is Bush’s folksy persona -- introduced to many Americans in the 2000 acceptance speech. As the 43rd president, he still employs the clipped sentences, wry quips and no-nonsense delivery.

That style has helped push the Republican incumbent consistently ahead of his Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, in the polls in most measures of decisiveness and leadership. It has also contributed to some voters’ perceptions that Bush can be reckless and bullheaded.

Finding the talismans in Bush’s convention speech is much easier today than it was four years ago.

Then, hundreds of journalists and political savants focused mostly on the Texas governor’s pledges to set aside ideology and to govern as a new-style “compassionate conservative.”

If there was a figure whom the media fixated on from that convention address, it was not Morris -- a member of the Continental Congress who went on to help found the State University of New York -- but former Texas Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock. As a Democratic legislative leader and lieutenant governor, Bullock frequently joined with Bush to push legislation through the state government.

Bush presented the late Bullock, his “great friend,” as proof that he would work across party lines in Washington, just as he had in Austin.

Bush today has Democratic allies -- including Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who will give the keynote speech at the Republican convention -- but no dependable coalition with the opposition. Opinions vary greatly on what happened to Bush’s bipartisanship.

Democrats have argued that the Texas governor was a partisan true believer all along, cloaking his conservative beliefs in politically ecumenical language. They point to rollbacks of Democratic environmental regulations, the limitations placed on stem cell research and his proposal to ban same-sex marriage as evidence of where Bush’s heart lies -- with industrial giants like oil companies and with religious fundamentalists.

Republicans suggest the president has been prevented from forging consensus by a Democratic minority, one that is particularly bitter because of his narrow, disputed 2000 election victory.

“A lot of state governors come to Washington as president and make the mistake of thinking they can be bipartisan,” said David Crockett, a Republican and assistant professor of political science at Trinity University in San Antonio. “Washington is a different ballgame. Then you factor in the bitterness of the 2000 election outcome, and there’s a real problem.”

But there were hints in the convention address that Bush intended all along to be decisive and not wait for others.

One powerful refrain in the 53-minute speech was a recitation of Clinton-Gore policy failures, followed by the repeated pledge: “They have not led. We will.”

Toward the end of the address, Bush restated his resolve: “I believe the presidency -- the final point of decision in the American government -- was made for great purposes.”

Craig Smith, who teaches communications studies at Cal State Long Beach, said those lines hinted at “a very different presidency than many people expected.”

“You can see it now in his acceptance speech: the take-no-prisoners attitude and the sense of good versus evil,” said Smith, a speechwriter for Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.

Presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of a recent biography of President John F. Kennedy, said he believed the 2000 convention speech revealed competing motivations that have confronted other conservative presidents.

“There is a lot of talk about small-bore government in their campaigns. But then they get elected and they want to do something. They want to leave a mark. They want to be reelected,” said Dallek, a visiting professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

“Bush is certainly someone who wants to eclipse his father -- who doesn’t want to lose after one term. Particularly after 9/11, he wants to leave a mark.”

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush’s approval rating reached a record high. That level of support has since been lost, with doubts about the war in Iraq and domestic policy dropping him to about 50% in several surveys. But he has edged past Kerry in recent polls, and stood at 52% in this week’s Los Angeles Times poll.

One of Bush’s foremost victories domestically has been the approval of income tax cuts -- $1.35 trillion in reductions approved in 2001 and a smaller amount adopted last year.

He says those reductions have spurred economic growth. Democrats cite the net loss of jobs since Bush took office and say tax cuts during wartime, unprecedented in modern American history, have helped pushed the federal budget shortfall to a record $500 billion a year.

Social Security reform was another marker in Bush’s “they have not led, we will” mantra. While the administration says it will continue to promote private retirement accounts, no specific proposal has been offered to Congress.

Bush’s pledge to “repair” Medicare, similarly, has been hamstrung by the growing deficit. And a new prescription drug benefit for seniors -- the 2000 speech pledged to “make prescription drugs available and affordable for every senior who needs them” -- has received mixed reviews from the elderly.

In education, some schools have recorded higher tests scores since the passage of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law. But other schools have improved their standings only after they dropped minority and disabled children from survey samples. And a tiny fraction of school districts have had the money or facilities to provide students the right to transfer to better campuses, as the law guaranteed.

The president’s no-nonsense persona was a relative novelty in the 2000 convention address.

He quipped about George Washington as an earlier vintage “George W.” and drew roars of laughter when he taunted Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore as so meek that he would have greeted the invention of the lightbulb as “a risky, anti-candle scheme.”

While some continue to criticize Bush for his simple syntax, several academics and historians say that much of the public likes what it hears.

“There is a Manichaean [rhetorical] streak in him -- good or bad, light or dark -- that resonates with a whole percentage of the population,” said Smith, the professor and former Republican speechwriter. “John Kerry wants to say there are shades of gray, which is a more difficult sell with the public. He [Bush] can take complicated times and put them into simple terms. Ronald Reagan understood the value of that too.”

That ability could serve Bush well come November. Polls hint that the president may be developing another Reagan quality: the ability to maintain popularity even when his policies lack broad public support

When Bush goes to the podium again Thursday night, Texas government professor Buchanan says he expects the president will continue to combine the assertive and conciliatory rhetoric that he mixed in 2000.

“These undecideds in the middle are the least aware of the specifics of the [Bush] record -- the chapter and verse,” Buchanan said. “They care about those personality traits. Those become surrogates for the issues.”