Who Chose George?

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Bush matched this effort by appearing as a guest star at carefully chosen fund raisers in key states. It was an old-fashioned way to do favors--and broaden his financial network. He and his father campaigned for Jim Gilmore in Virginia in 1997; the $500,000 take stunned even Gilmore's aides. There was a growing curiosity about this popular Governor with the big halo; organizers and activists and consultants wanted to see for themselves whether he had the right moves. In May 1998 he went to Ohio fund raisers for gubernatorial candidate Bob Taft and helped raise $700,000. "Bush was a huge draw," said Brian Hicks, who ran Taft's campaign. "People who would normally write a check but not attend the event attended the event. And those who normally do both but don't care about pictures got a picture."

In these early, intimate meetings, people wanted to see if he was one of them. Was he truly a conservative or a moderate, a Christian, a tax cutter, a libertarian? What breed of Republican was this guy? Bush seemed to have found a universal language. Warren Tompkins, a veteran G.O.P. operative in South Carolina, watched Bush come into the Palmetto State last year to raise money for Governor David Beasley. Tompkins recalled how people from both left and right remarked afterward, "This guy is talking to me." "Shoot," said Tompkins later, "that's when I thought this thing is gonna be real."

The hunger for a winner was about the eternal appetite for access and power, but there may have been something else at work as well among Republicans who had come to view Clinton's presidency as fundamentally illegitimate. It was not just that the Republicans had all but owned the White House for years. It was that Clinton had won by stealing their issues and then selling them better than they had, had not honored the office, and it was time to get it back.

Nowhere did the zeal for a winner work to Bush's advantage as in California, a state where the G.O.P. has factions inside factions. In April 1998, Bush went West to campaign for gubernatorial hopeful Dan Lungren in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. At one event, about a dozen of Lungren's biggest backers practically cornered Bush during a private conversation and pressed him to run. Bush demurred, in deference to Governor Pete Wilson, who was still considering another run at the nomination. But he winked. "I want to be your second choice," Bush told them, tipping his hand.

The deep wallets all dove in, not just Wilson guys but Lungren backers and old Reaganites and factions that usually try to have nothing to do with one another. Bush refused to rank them, stack the chairmen atop the vice chairmen; instead he made them all "pioneers," committed to raising $100,000 each for his campaign. "He did to California what Tito did to Yugoslavia," said Wayne Berman, a top G.O.P. fund raiser in Washington. "He pulled all the factions together and said it is better to live together than die alone."