Campaign 2000: Bush and McCain: Who Is The Real Reformer?

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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."