Who Is The Real Reformer?

By ERIC POOLEY

The harder George W. Bush campaigns these days, the twangier he gets. "What I'm 'a do," he said last week, jutting his jaw in South Carolina, "is remind people about my record--remind people that I'm comin' with a record from outside Washington." But it is a measure of the trouble Bush is in that when he started doing that--unveiling a new slogan, A REFORMER WITH RESULTS--he was trying to climb inside the knight's armor already worn by John McCain. And going after McCain for "passing the plate to lobbyists and special interests" is an odd choice for Bush, the $67 million candidate who refuses to abide by federal fund-raising limits. So by the time Bush hit Newberry, S.C., and started stringing all his favorite phrases into one--"A reformer with results is a conservative who has had compassionate results in the state of Texas"--even some of his supporters had to chuckle. It sounded like prattle, message without meaning--the kind of thing his father would say.

But Bush really does see himself as a reformer. Not on campaign finance--that's just a pose--but on all the other issues he talked about last week: welfare and tort reform, taxes and education. And he really does have a record of reform on those issues, though his results have been mixed. On matters he cares about, Bush has displayed a clear vision and a knack for getting down in the policy weeds that is wholly at odds with his featherweight image. But on other crucial matters--poverty and hunger, the death penalty, gun violence, health insurance for the poor, pollution--Bush has shown little willingness to lead or even think deeply. And sometimes the policies he puts into place are more beneficial to his wealthy campaign contributors than to the people of Texas.

It is, as Bush likes to say, a conservative record--one that assumes that what's good for business is good for Texas--but it is also a substantial one, worthy of more attention than it has received. The Governor's aides hope that by emphasizing the record now, Bush can transform his image from greenhorn and dilettante to Man of Accomplishment. It's late, but they have a shot, because Bush himself is transformed when he talks about Texas; he becomes more relaxed and self-assured than when he's wandering the fields of national policy. During an interview with TIME last month, Bush clearly relished debating his record. Slouching on his bus in a blue satin warmup jacket, he was sharp, combative and a bit relieved to be talking about things he knows inside out. He could tell stories about the leader he believes himself to be: the guy whose magnetism and wit got things done in Austin, and got all those now jittery Republican leaders on board his campaign long before anyone had heard of McCain's Straight Talk Express.

"People say the Texas Governor is a weak position," said Bush, propping his boots on a chair. "Only a weak person makes it a weak position." In fact, the Texas state constitution of 1876 made it weak in order to prevent Reconstruction-era carpetbaggers from wielding too much influence. "The Governor has no power," says Texas house speaker Pete Laney, "except what the legislature gives him or he takes with the force of his own personality." A 1997 study by the University of North Carolina ranked the powers of the office 49th out of the 50 governorships--which makes Texas "a perfectly good training ground for the [weak] Executive power of the presidency," says Bruce Buchanan, professor of government at the University of Texas. As with the President, the Governor's success depends on his use of the bully pulpit and his relationships with legislators. "Bush recognized that," says Laney, "so he wanted to work with us from the get-go."

Bush ran for Governor in 1994 on four reform issues: welfare, public schools, the juvenile-justice system and "frivolous" civil lawsuits. He chose them carefully--all were popular in Texas--but getting them done was no sure thing. To improve his odds, he cultivated relationships with the two Democrats who could make him a success--Laney, a West Texas cotton farmer who controls the house; and Bob Bullock, the profane, driven, endlessly colorful Lieutenant Governor who ran the senate and was the most powerful pol in Texas until shortly before he died last year. The three men would meet for breakfast every Wednesday--first at the Governor's mansion and then, because the food there wasn't greasy enough for Bullock, on his or Laney's turf. Laney remembers giving Bush one simple piece of advice: "You work with us, we'll help make you a good Governor." Before long, Bullock would be calling Bush "the best I've ever seen."

Bush tried to bond with every lawmaker in Texas. By the time he took office, in January 1995, he had met with nearly all the 181 members of the legislature--"the lege," which convenes every other year--asking about their issues, trying to understand their minds and motives: a solid month of virtuoso schmoozing. "For Bush, everything is personal," says Terral Smith, his legislative chief. "He needs to have the personal relationship before the issue comes up." He dropped in unannounced on legislators, gave them nicknames and bear hugs and backslaps, went to pancake dinners and football games in their districts. He wasn't just making nice. He was reminding them that he had a mandate and meant to use it. One lawmaker calls this "a velvet hammer. It's a guy thing."

The two guys Bush couldn't hammer were Laney and Bullock. At first, neither was sure about this new Governor who tried so hard to ingratiate himself. Could they trust him to keep his end of a deal? They found out during Bush's first session, when push came to shove on tort reform--a package of bills designed to rein in what Bush called "junk lawsuits that clog our courts." While it wasn't clear that frivolous lawsuits were out of control, business groups looking to limit their liability had for years been pouring money into the issue, helping create a pro-tort reform majority in the state senate. (The groups gave generously to Bush. In his two gubernatorial campaigns, he collected $4.1 million from tort-reform lobbyists, according to the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice--10% of his total contributions.)

Tort reform seemed inevitable, but after six weeks of negotiations in the spring of 1995, the package stalled over the issue of capping the punitive damages that juries use to punish defendants. Bush and the Republicans wanted a cap of $100,000; Bullock and the Democrats wanted it set at $1 million. When Bush refused to budge, state senator David Sibley, a Republican ally, told him the bill could die. Bush invited Sibley to the mansion for dinner that night. While they were eating, the phone rang. It was Bullock, calling to deliver something he was famous for--an "ass chewing," as it was known around Austin. Bush got chewed. "I am not sure anyone has ever talked to the Governor like that before," says Sibley. After it was over, Sibley asked Bush to consider a compromise cap--$750,000, far closer to Bullock's number than Bush's. The well-chewed Governor agreed. Sibley called Bullock and gave him the news, and Bullock asked to speak to Bush. "You're the greatest Governor in the history of Texas," he told the rookie. Then he sat back to see if Bush would keep his word. It wasn't easy for Bush to bring along reluctant members of his own party, but he did it. "I think that cemented the friendship with Bullock," says Sibley.

Last week Bush was making extravagant claims for his tort-reform package, saying he'd taken on the trial bar and saved Texans almost $3 billion in lowered insurance rates. As the Washington Post reported, insurance experts in Texas call the claim preposterous. Premiums have climbed since 1995, even as insurance companies have reaped windfall profits, because damage awards are smaller and lawsuits, even justified ones, are far more difficult to bring to trial. A grateful insurance industry has so far contributed nearly $1 million to Bush's presidential campaign.

THE ABC'S OF EDUCATION REFORM

One trial lawyer Bush never took on is Paul Sadler, a soft-spoken litigator from East Texas who is also the lege's leading wonk. As chairman of the house's public-education committee, the Democrat is a longtime player on the issue closest to Bush's heart, education reform, which had been under way in Texas for a decade by the time Bush ran. In 1993, Sadler led the fight to scrap the state's education code, and during Bush's first term, Sadler and others were writing the new code. Sadler says Bush jumped into the reform effort immediately and to great effect."His role in the rewrite was significant," says Sadler. "He met weekly with me at first, and by the end, almost daily--he used to joke that we were joined at the hip." Sadler's task was to push control of the schools to the local level while beefing up the statewide system of standards and accountability. "Bush raised the bar on what was acceptable performance," says Sadler, "and then he used his pulpit to help pass the bill."

For Bush, it was the first win in an education-reform program that came to include new teacher-training initiatives, beefed-up funding and new diagnostic tools to identify problem readers in the earliest grades. Standardized-test scores in the state have been climbing every year, with improvement among blacks and Latinos moving especially fast.

Last year Bush pushed for a controversial program to end social promotion, the practice of passing students who aren't academically qualified. His initiative would have required third-graders to pass a single standardized reading test in order to earn a ticket to fourth grade. That bothered Sadler, whose support Bush needed. At a meeting last year, Bush challenged him: "Sadler, you gonna pass my social-promotion bill?" Sadler replied, "Nah, I don't like it." "What's the problem?" Bush asked. Sadler told him that holding back students because they failed a single test wasn't fair. "You've got the conservative part of this down," he gibed. "Let me give you the compassionate part." Bush laughed. "Where you want to go with it?" Sadler outlined a plan for remediation, second chances, summer school and a grade-placement committee to catch mistakes. Bush was worried about diluting standards. "It was a very detailed discussion," says Sadler. "We talked about philosophy, and we talked about bricks and mortar. It was not just a vision thing--he knows his stuff."

Eventually Bush agreed to most of what Sadler wanted. If he hadn't, Bush admits, Sadler wouldn't have passed his bill. "He's powerful," says Bush. "There's a certain practicality to the political world. You play the hand you're dealt."

DEATH OF A TAX PLAN

Bush overplayed his hand during his second legislative session, in 1997. He launched his boldest reform as Governor, an ambitious and ultimately failed attempt to restructure the state tax code. He was trying to fix a big problem: public school funding depended far too heavily on local property taxes, which had risen dramatically. In January 1997, he proposed cutting property taxes by $3 billion, by using a $1 billion budget surplus, raising the sales tax by half a cent and levying a new tax on partnerships--lawyers, accountants, doctors and other professionals. It was risky politics and good policy, an attempt to create a tax code that reflected the modern Texas economy. But Bush multiplied his risk by violating a key lesson of 1995: he announced his plan without consulting Bullock or Laney. He did this, Bush told TIME, because "I was very aware what their reaction would be: 'We need the [surplus] for other programs.'" The maneuver infuriated Bullock, who thought he had his Governor better trained than that.

Laney thinks Bush had become overconfident. "The fact that everything had been smooth sailing up until then probably had to do with his eagerness," he says. Laney cooled him down by appointing a special committee to rewrite the bill. When the Democrats were done, it was almost unrecognizable. Where Bush had taken a small step toward tax fairness, the committee, chaired by Sadler, galloped down the road, shifting billions in taxes from property owners to business. Corporate interests howled and Republicans were aghast--but Bush supported the Democratic plan. "It was incredibly courageous of Bush to back this bill; he didn't have to," says Sadler, pointing out that former Governor Ann Richards, though faced with a school-funding crisis in 1993, refused to reform the tax code. "Bush didn't have a crisis but tried reform anyway."

First he lobbied the 68 Republicans in the house. "He used a finesse approach," says Laney, "and when it got down to the short rows, he maybe got harsher. He started out with the good-government speeches, then got a little more...vivid." Why did Bush work so hard to pass a reform bill his party couldn't stand? As he tells it now, he knew the house bill would never become law, because the senate was pushing a far more modest plan. He says his main concern was preserving a tax cut based on the $1 billion surplus, which was tucked inside the Trojan horse of the house reform bill. "I knew what I was doing," he says. "I was trying to get the bill over to the senate." He persuaded half of the house Republicans to support the bill, enough to win passage.

After the senate passed its smaller bill, Bush launched another personality blitz, trying to find compromise between the two versions. He turned the Governor's office into a war room, jawboned the Republican and Democratic caucuses, met with smaller groups and individual legislators--and discovered the limits of the personal approach to politics. He couldn't get enough Republicans to vote for a plan that smelled like a tax increase, even though its offsetting tax cuts were much larger. The bill was dead--and that, says Laney, "is when he grabbed his little piece of his pie." The $1 billion budget surplus was still on the table, and Bush used it to fund a $1 billion property-tax cut that passed easily. He didn't get his ambitious reshaping of the tax code, but he got a tax cut to run on. (In 1999 he got another--the two biggest in Texas history, as he never tires of saying.) Bush describes his salvaging of the '97 tax cut as a bold stroke, the triumph of his Trojan horse strategy. Laney says, "He took a defeat and turned it into pretty good spin."

SUFFER THE CHILDREN?

Bush's practicality and his willingness to listen and adapt account for much of his success as Governor. But it's also true that he owes a debt of gratitude to Democrats who killed some of the policies he most wanted to pass--a series of get-tough welfare-reform measures that raise the question of just how compassionate this conservative really is.

Bush's welfare-reform record looks good on paper. Since he took office, the welfare rolls have been cut in half, from 760,000 to 380,000. But poverty remains an aching problem in Texas, and one to which Bush has given scant attention. The state ranks near the bottom in almost every category of social well-being--poverty, hunger, pollution, children without health insurance.

When it comes to these social issues, Bush is mainly preoccupied, even more than many of his G.O.P. brethren, with further restricting access to the welfare system, which pays an average of $188 a month to poor families, making it one of the stingiest in the country. In 1995 Bush pushed for a two-year time limit on welfare recipients, with no opportunity to reapply. In 1995 and 1997 he wanted so-called family caps, in which those with two or more children would not receive additional assistance if they had another child. And in 1999 he opposed a large expansion of the federally funded Children's Health Insurance Program--even though 1 in 4 Texas children is without insurance--and called for two more hard-line welfare proposals. The first, known as "one strike and you're out," would have required anyone committing a felony or getting caught with drugs to be kicked off welfare permanently. The second, "full-family sanctions," would have seen to it that if a mother receiving welfare benefits failed to cooperate with authorities--for example, by not showing up for job training--her entire family would be cut off, kids and all. "Bush's staff worked hard at this," says Patrick Bresette of the Center for Public Policy Priorities. "But the legislature didn't want to go that far. Not one single measure got out of the senate."

Instead, the lege passed welfare-reform measures that were strict but somewhat more forgiving, with three-year time limits and provisions that the able-bodied must work. It also extended the child-health-insurance program to 200,000 more children. "In my experience, when given a choice between compassion and noncompassion, Bush invariably takes the noncompassionate path," says Elliott Naishtat, a Democrat who chairs the powerful house committee on human services, which handled the welfare bills. "Punishing the kids to get the mom to cooperate is not acceptable and not compassionate. You don't have to do it that way."

Naishtat and other Democrats believe that the harshness of Bush's positions sprang from his concern for winning Republican presidential primaries. "He did not want to leave himself open to attack on the right by appearing lenient," says Naishtat. House Democrat Glen Maxey remembers a day at the end of the 1999 session when Bush was pumping hard for his full-family-sanctions bill. Maxey and Naishtat were in the members' lounge when Bush aide Terral Smith walked in. "He sat down between us and said, 'We need y'all to have a meeting today to vote'" on the bill containing full-family sanctions. As Maxey tells it, Smith then said, "We think we need to adopt the Governor's welfare reform. The Governor needs sanctions to protect himself against Pat Buchanan in the primaries." Smith says he told them only that Buchanan would have a "heyday" with their welfare proposal.

When TIME asked Bush why he supported the sternest welfare measures, he resorted to standard-issue conservative rhetoric. "I don't buy the argument that old-style welfare programs are compassionate. Creating a sense of dependency is not compassionate." But why punish children for the sins of their parents? "We never said we were not going to fund children," he claimed, against the evidence. "They'd [still] have health insurance and food stamps."

That might sound convincing, until one recalls that 25% of Texas children have no health insurance and that food-stamp receipts in the state have dropped by almost half since 1995, even though 3 million Texans live in poverty. That's because people leaving welfare weren't informed that they still qualified for them. At best, Bush has been cavalier about the issue of hunger. Last December, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that Texas has the second worst hunger problem, with 1 million people going hungry each day, he dismissed it out of hand. "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry," he told a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "Where? I want to know the facts. I would like for the Department of Agriculture to show us who. Where are they?"

One explanation for Bush's ignorance on the subject is that in 1995 he vetoed a bill that would have established, at minimal cost to the state, a Food Security Council to gather information on hunger. "I'm sure there was a valid reason why I did that," Bush told TIME. "There's a lot of nice-sounding bills I have vetoed." He added, "I appreciate the kindness of the food-bank operators. I understand that the food banks are in some cases full. Seems like they're doing their jobs." He headed into a laugh, but caught himself. "For that I think we ought to thank people. One child going hungry is one child too many."

DARK CLOUDS

In January 1997, Bush was in a meeting with Ralph Marquez, his appointee to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the state's environmental agency. Near the end of the meeting, one of Bush's staff members made a reference to something called "grandfathered plants." "What are those?" Bush asked. Marquez explained that in 1971, when the state's Clean Air Act was passed, the bill had exempted all existing industrial plants from the new antipollution regulations. (Texas is funny that way.) Lawmakers assumed that many of these aging plants would soon shut down, but that didn't happen. They just kept spewing. By 1996, state environmental officials discovered that 36% of the industrial air pollution in Texas--which has one of the worst pollution problems in the country--was billowing from these 830 grandfathered plants, many of them operated by the biggest oil and chemical companies in the state. Hearing this, the Governor was incensed. "They've had 26 years to fix this? Don't you think it's time for them to do it?"

Marquez said the TNRCC had been exploring ways to bring the grandfathered plants into compliance. "Well, let's get moving," Bush said. Then he added, "But can you make it voluntary?" He may have been impatient with the polluters, but he still wasn't willing to get tough with them. Perhaps because of his own career in the West Texas oil fields, Bush shares the mind-set of the industry, believing that "you can't sue or legislate your way to clean air and clean water."

History teaches the opposite. Progress against pollution has come because of regulation, not the beneficence of industry. At the time of Bush's meeting with Marquez, some TNRCC officials had been pushing for a law that would have required the plants to clean up. Bush's insistence on a voluntary approach--an attitude shared by Marquez, a former executive at Monsanto--quashed that idea. In early 1997, Bush's team held a series of private meetings with oil-, gas- and chemical-industry leaders and invited them to draft a plan for a voluntary emission-reduction program. The secret meetings came to light last summer, when an Austin activist named Peter Altman filed an open-records request. Despite cries from environmentalists, the plan passed the legislature, in only slightly tougher form, last year. Bush says he is proud he got the grandfathered plants to the table, and to his credit, no Governor before him did as much. (He also backed a bill that forces electric utilities to clean up.) But advocates say his voluntary plan isn't working. It levies some fines, but they apply to less than 5% of the plants, according a study by the Environmental Defense Fund. And since November 1997, when sign-up began, only 33 of the 160 biggest industrial plants have volunteered. Of those 33, only three have taken steps to cut their emissions. Questioned about this during an interview with TIME, Bush became irritated. "Well, maybe we need to increase the fines during the next legislative session," he said. "I'm a practical person. I'm sorry you're skeptical, or the Sierra Club is skeptical. Sometimes when people don't get their way in politics, they put out a signal: 'Let's be skeptical.'"

Sometimes skepticism is justified. Bush insists the program is a success, and the corporations that dodged regulation seem to agree. So far, lobbyists, lawyers and executives for companies operating the 100 worst grandfathered plants have contributed more than $1 million to his presidential campaign, according to an analysis by Public Research Works, an Austin watchdog group. "They're hoping Bush will be making environmental policy at the national level next year," says the group's executive director, Robin Schneider.

Bush's environmental record has Al Gore licking his chops. Texas leads the country in a frightening array of toxin- and carcinogen-release statistics, and last year Houston passed Los Angeles for the dubious distinction of America's smoggiest city. Though some emission levels have declined in recent years, four metro areas are flunking EPA clean-air standards. To achieve compliance, Houston will have to reduce nitrous-oxide emissions as much as 90%. Faced with this crisis--and the presidential race--Texas officials are moving quickly to draw up new plans to reduce emissions. And Bush has asked his regulators to consider adopting California's strict auto-emission standards. "It's funny--the closer he gets to the general election," says Ken Kramer, director of the Sierra Club's Texas chapter, "the more of an environmentalist he becomes. But his record doesn't lie."

Bush's record represents his best shot at convincing voters that he isn't just a new kind of favorite son--a way for a father to avenge defeat or party elders to retake the White House. It is also a window on what kind of President he would be: a nimble leader who bonds with the players, exploits his charm and energy, but also takes what he can get, sees what he wants to see and has no problem getting along with entrenched power.

--With reporting by James Carney with Bush and S.C. Gwynne/Austin

With reporting by James Carney with Bush and S.C. Gwynne/ Austin