The Republicans

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This was a period when Eastern Establishment Republicans were figures of hate and ridicule to "real" Republicans who backed Goldwater, the year Charles Percy and George Romney were lumped with Nelson Rockefeller as traitors to the party. Yet here, in Houston, was a Republican looking more like a Saltonstall than a Lyndon Johnson, but who was as hard as Barry against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Once again, Bush was extending the spirit of the tough summer job. Rich kids are supposed to go out and join the workers in the field, but they are also supposed to come home by Labor Day. Bush was staying on, going native. In undertaking this unrequited love affair with Texas, Bush tried too hard, too embarrassingly, to be what he was not, and found it impossible to maintain his own dignity or gain his neighbors' respect. He was putting himself in line for a long series of humiliations. His yearning to be a Texan has a kind of noble mystery to it and such a pathetic persistence that Texans like Journalist Molly Ivins turn him down wistfully, wishing they did not have to. "I think created Texans are just as good as birth Texans," she says. "Most of those who died at the Alamo had come from somewhere else. But Bush has to know that there are three things a Texan does not do. We do not use 'summer' as a verb. We do not wear blue ties with little green whales on . them. And we do not call trouble 'doo-doo.' We're not setting the standards high. But there they are."

Why did Bush choose a cultural displacement he could never make convincing? Abasement training at Andover cannot have gone that deep. He spoke of forming a vital Republican Party in the Democratic state of Texas, as if he were his father disinterestedly keeping the two-party system alive. But Prescott Bush brought high standards to the Senate -- opposing Joseph McCarthy, championing civil rights bills -- and later criticized the war in Viet Nam. George Bush entered public life opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He went native without much principle, perhaps because he had not given it much thought. Belonging mattered more than weighing the issues at stake. He was not going to "dick" much about ideas. There were games to be won (he tried to set up a soccer league in Texas) and clubs to be organized. Few suspect George Bush of meanness. The fault must have been intellectual. At any rate, something fatal was lost and would never be retrieved when Prescott Bush's son ran a Barry Goldwater race in 1964. He admitted to an Episcopal priest that he had gone too far to the right in his urge to win.