Registered: Aug 2000
Location: ObamaNation
Posts: 14541

"He is Forrest Gump with a trust fund."

The Accidental President

Joan Ryan Tuesday, November 28, 2000


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A FUNNY look briefly came over George W. Bush's face during his televised statement Sunday night. It might have been my imagination, I admit, but I can still see it in my mind. In an otherwise stiff and aristocratic speech, Bush suddenly seemed to awaken to the improbability, even preposterousness, of what was happening. Here he was, the frat-boy cheerleader whose one true aspiration well into adulthood was to run a baseball team, and now he was about to become, in all likelihood, the next president of the United States.

I remember his words at a Hartford, Conn., fund-raising speech early in his presidential campaign, when his candidacy was raising eyebrows. "Friends of mine from Yale are in the audience tonight," he said, "and they're in a state of shock."

He was only half kidding. One gets the sense that, as surprised as some of us might be that he could very well be our president, perhaps no one is more surprised than Bush himself.

When I interviewed him during the South Carolina primary, I came away with the impression that Bush was like a boy riding this bus not so much because he has his mind set on a particular destination, but because this happened to be the bus that came along. And because of his family's political connections, his family's wealth, his own abilities or plain luck, Bush seems through little effort to have ended up in the right place at the right time.

He is Forrest Gump with a trust fund.

"I've never been one to worry about what my next move will be," he said, as we talked aboard his campaign bus. "Somebody asked, 'What are you going to do after governor?' I said, 'I don't know. And I'm not the least bit worried about it either, I want you to know.' "

He went to Andover because his father went to Andover. He went to Yale because his father went there, too. He's still not sure why he went on to Harvard Business School.

"I just went. I didn't have a game plan. I just thought it would be an interesting opportunity to broaden my horizons. About halfway through my senior year, somebody asked, 'What are you going to do?' I said, 'I dunno.'

"And so it just happened that I went to Midland (Texas) on the way to visit friends in Tucson. And it became clear: This is it. I started a little company and things went well."

Bush smiled and shrugged. "It's the nature of my life."

Things just always seem to work out. It didn't seem to occur to Bush as he talked that he sounded like the trust-funded, safety-netted, well-connected kid he was, the oldest of five children whose wealthy grandfather served in Congress and whose wealthy father became president. I sensed he had yet to question why he has sailed along the course set by his father, from Andover to Yale to the oil business to politics. It seemed simply to be the path he found himself on, and he found no compelling reason to find one of his own making.

He seemed truly passionate about education reform but offered up no driving reason for his candidacy. When I asked what he could teach if he suddenly had to come up with a semester-long course, he replied, "Modern American politics. " But it turned out he didn't mean governance.

"I'd look at advertising, message, themes, how a candidate develops issues and the timing of campaigns. I've got a very good sense of timing in campaigns, " he said.

He has campaigned well enough, it appears, to reach the White House. But in that moment during Sunday's speech, I wondered if he was asking himself the same awful question another accidental leader, Robert Redford in "The Candidate," asked in 1972:

"Now what do we do?"

E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.




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The Word of the Day is Oblectation (n.) - Delight, pleasure.

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Registered: Aug 2000
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Sharp lady gathering all that and forming that kind of opinion. Interesting read. Forest Gump with a trust fund. "That's my boat."

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Titleist

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I'm scared.

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This Space For Rent.

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*Looks up in the sky and whistles with hands behind her back as she walks out the thread.

[This message has been edited by HELL (edited 11-30-2000).]

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Registered: Jul 2000
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Any anti-Bush media piece can be rebutted with another. Considering how biased the US media is towards AlGore and the liberals, GWB is getting an awful lot of positive press.

US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT

Cover Story 12/4/00

By Michael Barone

Thou shalt not steal
Why rules really do matter – more than results

At this writing, Al Gore's strategy of stealing the election by barring the counting of legitimately cast military votes and manufacturing illegitimate votes out of dimpled chads is sputtering. Despite losing in the certified total, Gore is contesting the election on several grounds. But he seems unlikely to prevail. The Florida Supreme Court is unlikely to extend its deadline and order a hand recount in Miami-Dade County; it refused to do so last week, without even bothering to hear the Bush lawyers. Nor is the court likely to require Palm Beach County to count every dimpled chad as a vote. And does Gore want to challenge any late military votes included in the total by Secretary of State Katherine Harris?

While his legal case remains alive, it is worth contemplating the audacity of Gore's election-stealing scheme. The systematic exclusion of military votes by Democratic lawyers was not a pretty sight. Joseph Lieberman insisted on the Sunday talk shows that he and Gore would never exclude lawfully cast military ballots. That was, to put it kindly, an untruth. The day before, acting under written instructions, Gore-Lieberman lawyers excluded dozens of nonpostmarked military votes that were otherwise perfectly legal. In Duval County, Democratic lawyers raised their fists in triumph when they persuaded the canvassing board to reject 44 nonpostmarked military ballots. This brings to mind the joke about why the National Institutes of Health finally decided to replace their laboratory rats with lawyers; there are some things rats just will not do.

Scheming. Unfortunately for Gore, he was unable to enlist enough accomplices in this scheme to manufacture more than the necessary 930 votes out of all those dimpled chads. The 2-to-1-Democratic canvassing board in Broward County cooperated, abandoning its "two chad" rule when it failed to produce enough Gore votes. But the dithering canvassers in Miami-Dade decided they could not meet the court's deadline. And in Palm Beach County, the canvassers successfully fought a Gore challenge requiring counts of all dimpled chads and instead counted dimpled chads on ballots where voters dimpled other chads but not when they punched clean holes for candidates in other races. That was a change from Palm Beach County's policy since 1990 of counting no dimpled chads, and it goes against the practice in almost all states.

Looming over the Florida courts now as they consider Gore's contest is the specter of the United States Supreme Court. Gore lawyers assumed breezily that the court would not claim jurisdiction and so were stunned late last week when it did. The court is focusing on whether constitutional and statutory provisions requiring that the Legislature establish election law before Election Day were violated by the Florida court. This brings to mind the case of Roe v. Alabama, decided in 1995 by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. In this case, the Alabama courts changed the rules on counting absentee ballots after an election, changing the result. The 11th Circuit overturned the election on the ground that rule changes after the election that result in adding ineligible votes violate the rights of legitimate voters.

The federal constitutional and statutory provisions make even stronger the holding of Roe: You can't change the rules after the election. True, in Roe a trial court made factual findings that Alabama had changed its rules. But the facts here are on the record. The Florida Supreme Court decision changed the rules in Florida, abolishing one deadline and establishing another, reading a law that said must as meaning may and a law reading may as meaning must. Broward County changed its rules for counting chads in midstream, and Palm Beach County changed its rules from what they had been since 1990. All these changes tended to produce more votes for Gore. The case is ripe for decision. In both cases, the rules were changed after an election to alter the outcome.

A U.S. Supreme Court reversal would have the happy consequence of reaffirming the precept that rules actually mean what they say, rejecting the idea that "hypertechnical" rules can always be changed. I attended Yale Law School from 1966 to 1969, just before the Clintons, and I remember the intellectual atmosphere there. The law was not a matter of right or wrong but a process by which clever liberal people manipulated words to produce the results they wanted. This strain of thought produces the kind of judicial activism we saw in the Florida Supreme Court. Rules can always be changed, this school of thought has it; only results are important. Such thinking explains why Gore thought he could get away with blocking legal military votes and inventing illegal dimpled-chad votes. Had the U.S. Supreme Court not stepped in, Gore would have made either himself a president discredited by a dimpled-chad victory or Bush a president discredited by winning the presidency (as he legally could) by a vote of the Florida Legislature. Now the U.S. Supreme Court or the Florida Supreme Court, if it rules against Gore's contest, can help avoid either outcome.


I have always preferred facts over conjecture. But then again, I'm a Conservative so of course I do.

CAL



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"The desert is my church, and hunting is my god."

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Cal, lets just go have a beer. I am so tired of this.

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No kidding, we can wear our "Sore-Loserman 2000" shirts!! hehe

CAL

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"The desert is my church, and hunting is my god."

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quote:

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Originally posted by CAL:
No kidding, we can wear our "Sore-Loserman 2000" shirts!! hehe

CAL

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Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Illinois
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quote:

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Originally posted by CAL:
US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT

Cover Story 12/4/00

By Michael Barone

Thou shalt not steal
Why rules really do matter – more than results

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Location: Los Angeles, Ca
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quote:

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Originally posted by HELL:
I say iF we see gore/loserman on the way we just kick their faces in.
Ill bring some napkins so we can wipe their brains off our shoe.

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Cocktail napkins... their brains are few and far between.

quote:

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Cool subtitle, but did anyone else notice the date? Is this just something magazines do or is it a misprint?

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It is the cover story for the next issue.

CAL




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"The desert is my church, and hunting is my god."

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