Campaign 2000: Why Bush Doesn't Like Homework

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His leadership style is similarly direct. Although he insists "the details are important," Bush freely admits that he prefers one-page memos to bound treatises, oral briefings to long meetings. When he is briefed, he doesn't just sit back and listen. He engages his advisers, testing their logic and pressing them to get to the heart of the matter. From the minute someone starts talking about an issue, Bush is itching for a recommendation. As Albert Hawkins, his state budget director, says, "If you're going on too long, he tells you so." Says Bush: "I like to hear someone enunciate a position, pro or con. Because if someone cannot explain a position, that generally means they don't understand the issue well enough to be part of the decision-making process."

Bush won office in 1994 against a popular incumbent largely because he was disciplined. Month after month during the campaign, he kept repeating his four-point agenda. Once in office, he took the same approach and applied it to governing. In each legislative session, he set a few policy goals, outlined the principles by which he would judge success and gave other people the power to work out the details. "We can make decisions based on his principles, which are very clear," says Vance MacMahon, Bush's state policy director. "We don't have to run every decision up the flagpole."

For all his ambivalence about his Ivy League experience, Bush picked up his successful management skills at Harvard Business School. That's where, according to classmate Peter Gebhard, the future politician showed strength in classes dealing with "human behavior in organizations." Early in his time there, Professor Harry L. Hansen warned Bush and his fellow students that they would be inundated with more work than they could handle. Hansen had a higher purpose than assigning punishing amounts of work: the real goal, he explained, was to force students to learn how to separate what was important from what wasn't and then focus on it.

Bush's ability to focus at the right time has yielded such results as tort reform in Texas. The bill had been languishing in the legislature in 1995. When state senator David Sibley, the G.O.P. author of the legislation, went to see Bush to tell him it was dead, Bush invited him to dinner at the Governor's mansion. Until then, the Governor had kept his distance from legislative machinations. That night he weighed in. With Sibley by his side, Bush got on the phone with the Democratic Lieutenant Governor, Bob Bullock, and in a matter of minutes hammered out a compromise that saved the bill. Even though the deal angered some of Bush's allies in the business community, he stuck by it. "He's like the guy at the pool party who sort of walks up to the diving board and does a double twist with a flip," Sibley says now. "He made it look easy."

Is there such a thing as a wrenching dilemma for Bush? When asked to name the toughest decisions he's made, he hesitates, as if he can't think of any. "Well, the toughest decision was to run," he says at first. He pauses again and then recalls two death-penalty decisions, including his well-publicized refusal to grant a stay of execution to Karla Faye Tucker, that are featured in his book A Charge to Keep, which will be published next week. The next tough call that comes to mind: "The decision to fire Bobby Valentine" as manager of the Texas Rangers when Bush was co-owner.