Reply #12: Notes On A Native Son

[Octafish]

Harper's Magazine,  Feb, 2000  by Joe Conason,  Kevin P. Phillips

I. THE GEORGE W. BUSH SUCCESS STORY

A heartwarming tale about baseball, $1.7 billion, and a lot of swell friends

By Joe Conason

FORTUNE'S CHILD

As George W. Bush's wealthy admirers continue to pack cash into the largest presidential war chest in American history (at last count a staggering $58 million). perhaps the time is ripe to examine how the would-be president became rich himself--quite rich, in fact, if not by the standards of H. Ross Perot or Steve Forbes, at least by the measure of most Americans. Bush, who received $15 million for his share of the Texas Rangers franchise, would be the richest Democratic or Republican nominee since Lyndon Johnson. On the June 1998 day that the baseball team was sold, Bush told reporters, "When it is all said and done, I will have made more money than I ever dreamed ..."

Indeed. The sum represented an enviable 2,400 percent increase on the $606,000 investment Bush had made in the team nine years earlier, with borrowed money, and a considerable improvement on his own record of losing millions invested by others. Together with his elation about the windfall there may also have been a feeling of vindication for the eldest scion of the Bush family. Although twice elected governor of Texas (in 1994 and again in 1998), the son known as "Dubya" had lived through nearly two decades of business failures, embarrassing bailouts, and eyebrow-raising favors that had besmirched his family's reputation.

The money, coming late in Bush's life, at age fifty-one, is understood not to have corrupted him, and his handlers depict him as a man of religious faith and moral character who will cleanse a White House soiled by scandal; Bush, in their audience-tested Calvinistic fable, is a once-upon-a-time hard-drinking ne'er-do-well transformed into a well-to-do teetotaler. The fact that his political rise has been crowned with material rewards might, in the metaphysics of American capitalism, very well be deemed a sign of righteousness and divine favor.

But viewed in less sentimental terms, the history of George W. and his millions is a success story about a privileged young man who grew up in proximity to money and political power, appreciated the relationship between them, and so learned to live happily ever after with his wealth and his conscience. Not only does the story explain why Bush is so attractive to the corporate leaders and Washington lobbyists now staging his nomination for the presidency; it is also a textbook lesson in modern American civics. We who might soon elect Bush should hear this story, to know how he might act should he achieve the Oval Office. Although the immediate mechanics of the Rangers deal were well-documented by the media, the sale of the team was but a moment in the governor's long and still-unfolding political and financial relationships with certain fortunate personages--some of whom, it can reasonably be expected, might be appointed to positions of authority in a new Bush administration. The numbers are complicated, and many of the sums imponderably huge, but the power is real and the outcome as observable as, well, a brand-new baseball stadium.

CONTINUED...

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_1797_300/ai_59086099

If more people had read this article when it first appeared in the February 2000 Harper's, the election wouldn't have been as close. Who knows how different the last four years would be?