Campaign 2000: Why Bush Doesn't Like Homework

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Set aside that Bush replied to a question about the Middle East peace process by talking up missile-defense systems at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in sensitive negotiations. And never mind the fact that he probably meant the Mediterranean Sea, along which Israel has a lengthy border, and not the Red Sea, on which it has but one port. There was something else jarring about what Bush said. There is no such thing as an "inter"-ballistic missile. These mistakes may seem minor, but taken together they suggest that Bush is still under water when grappling with foreign- and defense-policy basics.

A large part of Bush's attitude about knowledge comes from a combative anti-intellectualism he developed as a Texas-bred Bush attending Ivy League schools back East. Ever since George W. left Houston to follow in his father's footsteps at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., he has viewed with deep suspicion and disdain the world of elite Northeastern academia and the people who populate it. Bush was one of the most popular students in his class at Yale. He mixed easily with the rich and the well bred, but, according to classmates, he developed an intense dislike for the class of Yalie he deemed "intellectual snobs." To Bush, the epitome of the type was Strobe Talbott, the current Deputy Secretary of State. Talbott (a distant relative of Bush) was one of the class of 1968's most ambitious brains--editor of the Daily News, Rhodes scholar roommate at Oxford to Bill Clinton, and before joining the Clinton Administration, career journalist for TIME magazine, specializing in defense and foreign policies. "Strobe was the kind of person George could not stand," says Robert Birge, who was a member with Bush in Skull & Bones, a Yale secret society. "He was appalled by people like Strobe. I don't know why, but it was a real issue with him."

Bush won't talk about Talbott specifically, but he will say "there is a certain East Coast attitude," an "intellectual arrogance" that he "didn't find very appealing" at Yale or, later, Harvard Business School. He suggests that the intellectual elite at Yale dismissed him as inferior, that there was, in his words, a "'You're from Texas, therefore' attitude" he resented. "And I still believe," he says, "that just because somebody's got an Ivy League title by their name doesn't make them smarter than anybody else."

That hardly puts Bush, who holds two Ivy degrees, at odds with mainstream America. But it may explain why he doesn't feel compelled to absorb all the information in the briefing books assembled for him by his own stable of heavily credentialed experts. Besides, in Austin, at the statehouse and in campaign headquarters on Congress Avenue, his distaste for the highbrow is considered a virtue. In meetings with his speechwriter and press staff, Bush reviews the words that will go out under his name with a keen eye for the pompous and overwrought. When he spots a sentence that wouldn't make sense to the average layman, Bush peers over his half glasses and reads it back to his staff in a haughty, mock-intellectual voice. "He's always asking,'How can we say it more directly?'"says a top aide.