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Sunday, January 19, 2003

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

As war with Iraq nears and the American economy continues to slide, the healthy glow from November's midterm election triumphs is losing some luster at the Bush White House.

How will the administration handle the widening circle of criticism coming not only from the left and center but now from the right? What is the true nature of this president whose election is the most controversial since 1876 as he continues to face a series of crises since Sept. 11, 2001?

Three new titles contain a welter of clues but no consistent answer. Michael Lind's assessment of George W. Bush is relentless in its rejection, while David Frum's is too syrupy sweet in its adulation.

The trio of Dubove, Reid and Cannon strike a more balanced view in their biography of Karl Rove, the man behind the Republican Party's recent successes and Bush's chief strategist and propagandist.

Karl the kingmaker

	"Boy Genius" By Lou Dubose, Jan Reid and Carl M. Cannon Public Affairs. ($15; paper)

Rove, now 52, launched his career as a Republican political operative in the Democratic Party-controlled Texas of the early 1980s. By the time he accompanied Bush to Washington, the GOP was in charge of Texas state government from top to bottom.

Among his clients were U.S. Sens. Phil Gramm and Kay Hutchinson and the present Texas governor, Rick Perry. But his greatest creation is Bush, son of a former president, the patrician New Englander whose only tie to Texas for years was a Houston hotel room he used as a voting address.

In George W., who had failed in earlier political and business ventures, Rove had a genial member of the Texas old boys club with name recognition and the discipline to do what Rove told him.

He could also raise money from the wealthy -- gushers of it. The Rove campaign crushed incumbent Gov. Anne Richards in 1994 using a simple right-wing message, buckets of that cash and dirty tricks, including blackmailing reporters through rumor campaigns about their sexual preferences.

The same technique worked in 2000, boosted by Bill Clinton's unsavory image and the removal of Republican challenger John McClain, using a whispering campaign in the South Carolina primary that ran the gamut from questioning the senator's sanity and his masculinity to claiming his wife stole drugs.

Rove's greatest triumph came in the weeks following the presidential election, as he orchestrated the hard-nosed drive in Florida to prevent Al Gore from winning that tainted vote.

With a boost from the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, Rove's man became president, and Rove became one of the most powerful men in Washington.

"Boy Genius" organizes the key details behind Karl Rove's crucial role in the Bush presidency including a laudatory observation by Cannon that the Sept. 11 aftermath has softened the legendary hatchet man.

The nays of Texas

	"Made in Texas" By Michael Lind Basic Books/New America Books ($24)

There are no scenes of redemption in Michael Lind's scathing assault on the cultural roots of the George W. Bush success. A native of Austin and a University of Texas graduate, Lind is also author of "Up From Conservatism" and "The Radical Center" and senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

The recent exposure of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., as a congenital racist helps to support Lind's chief argument that the Southern planter oligarchy, with its traditions of enslavement, exploitation, mindless militarism, "hillbilly religion" and economic primitivism, was in solid control of the Republican Party.

As he puts it, "The party of Lincoln was now the party of Jefferson Davis."

Bush the son is a child of this Southern tradition in its Texas form, made even more palatable to the right because of his "born-again" religious fundamentalism, he says.

Lind starts off slowly by retelling the history of Texas, which he breaks down into a story of tribes: Anglo-Celtic Southerners, Tejanos (Mexican-Texans), Germans and African-Americans.

"To summarize ... 1836 until the 1960s in one sentence: the biggest tribe, the Anglo-Celtic Southerners, expropriated the Tejanos, deported the Indians, crushed the Germans and exploited the blacks."

Gathering speed -- and anger -- Lind uses the experience of his home state as a template for American history to explain the ascendancy of these Southern traditions, with modifications, over 21st-century politics.

Policies of the Bush White House, from the environment to its support of the right-wing Israeli government, have their roots in the Southern past, he insists, and the future is bleak.

"The capture on Inauguration Day 2001 of the vast power of the federal apparatus by Southern reactionaries and their allies . . . means that in the administration of George W. Bush, the Southern oligarchs are a threat to the peace and well-being not only of Americans, but of the world."

Lind's rejection of the Bush government also gives him the chance to present his own vision of how America should be governed, a combination of New Deal-style capitalism, tolerant social attitudes, decentralized government, redistribution of population and cooperative foreign and trade policies.

It's an approach that's too black and white and a bit naive in today's climate of win-at-all-costs politics and global economies. Perhaps Lind is too dismissive of George Bush, who, after all, condemned Lott's Dixiecrat comments as the Mississippian lost his Senate majority leader job.

Then again, the president this month renominated Lott protege Charles Pickering, earlier rejected for his racist past, to a federal appeals court spot. In the world of "Made in Texas," it's no surprise.

The cheerleader

	"The Right Man" By David Frum Random House ($25.95)

If Michael Lind's assessment of George Bush is resolutely negative, David Frum's view of the president is an unabashed love letter.

Frum, an American Enterprise Institute fellow and contributor to conservative publications, spent just more than a year writing speeches on the economy for the president, which probably explains why he's no longer at the White House. He also takes credit for dreaming up the "axis" part of Bush's "axis of evil" label

Aside from his insider accounts of life at White House on Sept. 11 and snide comments about ex-aide Karen Hughes, Frum contributes little insight to our knowledge of how policy is made.

And, in the same way that Lind works in his views of government while attacking Bush, Frum repeats the same old right-wing attacks on the Democrats under the pretext of supporting the president.

Dredging up the memories of "appeasement" charges dating to Joe McCarthy, Frum -- without any hard evidence -- claims that had Al Gore been president on Sept. 11, the United States would not have made as strong a response.

"Instead, the man in charge was a man whose moral vision was not occluded by guilt or self-doubt," says Frum, citing a speech by ex-President Bill Clinton, who said Arab terrorism is rooted in longstanding hatred of the West and that Americans should understand that.

In the Bush White House, there was no subtlety -- the terrorists were just evil.

Curiously, when the Revs. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed the terrorist attacks on the moral laxity of Americans, they were off the Frum hook.

Despite Frum and Lind, the world of George Bush is not black and white. Given the opportunity to write an objective on-the-spot report of the administration's early days, Frum opted to keep the door to re-employment open instead.