The Selling of George Bush

By JAMES CARNEY AND JOHN F. DICKERSON/WASHINGTON

Anyone who has spent time with George W. Bush can tell a version of the same story about the frictionless ease of his personality. Longtime friend and campaign manager Don Evans remembers the grace with which Bush gave away a box of tools he was selling to a man who was eyeing them but clearly didn't have the dough. Texas Rangers fans recall the effortless charm of the team owner who sat in the regular seats, and even John McCain, Bush's nemesis in the primaries, marvels at the seductive charisma he encountered in their first postprimary meeting. Jim Ferguson, one of Bush's admen, is convinced: "If people get a glimpse of what they would see if they actually met him, they will elect him." To Mark McKinnon, Bush's top media adviser, the Bush personality is magic, "like lightning in a bottle."

The full-scale marketing of Bush lightning is about to begin. With the first round of general-election ads sponsored by the campaign airing as early as this week and the Republican Convention opening July 31, the Bush team is taking its message--that their candidate is a "new kind of Republican," a "compassionate conservative" and, most important, a "good man"--to a national audience. Courtesy of an eclectic team of admen and message masseurs, the public will be marinated in images of the candidate. Each one will underscore the idea that this well-bred scion of a political dynasty is a regular guy with a good heart. Whether it's grainy footage in the convention film of Bush's childhood in Midland, Texas; a 30-sec. ad featuring Bush behind the wheel of a beat-up Ford Bronco on his dusty ranch outside Waco; or a candid moment at home when he and his wife Laura share a laugh at his expense, the point will be the same: that Bush, with his sunny optimism and persuasive charm, is the antidote to eight years of duplicity and partisan bickering in Washington.

Bush is hoping the personal really is the political. He has unveiled some substantive policy proposals, but his advisers know that voters won't elect him on the basis of his plan to partly privatize Social Security or his promise to reform Section 8 housing. Bush faces the apathy born of prosperity. "I just can't remember a time when the public's been so tuned out of a presidential campaign," says Ronald Reagan's famous imagemaker, Michael Deaver. "People are going to make their decision based on the impression a candidate makes more than anything else." Like John Kennedy, who ran in the prosperity of the Eisenhower years in 1960, Bush must exploit Americans' desire for what chief strategist Karl Rove calls "reasonable change"--a yearning for what they already have, only better. And so the Bush pitch is basically this: that he will be a centrist consensus builder who won't squander today's prosperity but will make Americans feel good about their leader again.

Capturing that feeling and conveying it over the airwaves to the broader public is the job of Bush's unusual media team. Led by McKinnon, a lapsed Democrat and former guitar picker who in his youth hung out with Kris Kristofferson, the bunch includes veteran G.O.P. adman Stuart Stevens, who doubles as a successful novelist, travel and TV-script writer, and a cadre of Madison Avenue advertising whizzes who call themselves the Park Avenue Posse.

At first glance, McKinnon is an unlikely messenger for the G.O.P. cause. With the air of the Nashville singer-songwriter he once was, he is the kind of hep-cat presence that red-meat Republicans like to mock. A longtime Democratic consultant, based in Austin, Texas, who grew so disillusioned with politics that he gave it up in the mid-1990s, McKinnon was wooed back into the game by Bush's charms. Now he is not only Bush's chief imagemaker--directing the convention film, overseeing the campaign ads and even shooting some of the footage himself--but he is also part of the Bush message. When searching for proof of the candidate's ability to reach across the political spectrum, communications director Karen Hughes simply points to McKinnon's Road-to-Damascus experience.

If it's odd to have a Democrat working for a Republican, it's even stranger that the message adviser with the Texas-size twang and 'tude is based in the heart of Manhattan. Jim Ferguson, president of Young & Rubicam's New York City office and a Hico, Texas, native, heads up the collection of advertising talent that has been called in to turn its skill for selling Advil and Chicken McNuggets to selling the candidate--much as Reagan's "Tuesday Team" did in 1984. The Park Avenue Posse--named after the location of Ferguson's apartment, where the small group held its first six-hour meeting with advisers from Austin--has worked with the Bush campaign as well as the Republican National Committee on its TV ads, which have already started airing. During its weekly meetings, the Posse also acts as a cultural sounding board for notions from Austin on everything from the candidate's message to convention music. Last week, when some members of the team heard the score written for the convention by Manhattan composer David Horowitz, they gave the thumbs-up.

Rounding out the message team are Hughes and Rove. At campaign headquarters in Austin, an industrious policy shop churns out ideas that fit into the compassionate conservative rubric. Rove then picks the optimal political moment to unveil them. In a process Rove describes as "political heuristics," most people don't retain the details of Bush's proposals, but they come away with a positive feeling about Bush that makes them more inclined to vote for him. "They get a sense of his values, of what kind of a person he is," says Rove.

If Bush's personality is political gold, it was mined in Midland. No conversation with Bush or those who know him lasts very long without loping back to the dusty oil town on the flat plains of West Texas where Bush grew up and then returned to try his hand at business. In the narrative of Bush's life, Midland is seen as a kind of egalitarian utopia. His wife Laura is from Midland, and Bush says he will be buried there. When asked the difference between him and his famously preppy father, the candidate often simply says "Midland," as if no more explanation were needed. "In Midland each individual matters," Bush told TIME. "It's a long way away from the structured world of the East Coast, where there is a sense of class distinction."

Midland even informs Bush's policy preferences. Not long ago, on a campaign swing to Oregon, he tried to explain to a group of factory workers why he believes a portion of their Social Security should be invested in private accounts. "Maybe it's because I was raised in West Texas, far away from the center of power," Bush said, "and I trust individuals." McKinnon and a film crew flew to Midland last month to shoot footage for the convention film, and references to Bush's homestead are sure to find their way into the convention speech.

This West Texas city built on oil is the starting point for the Bush backstory; the second chapter of his autobiography, written mostly by Hughes, is titled "Midland Values." For those who market Bush, highlighting his Midland roots is a way to counter a competing impression of the man as a callow, underachieving product of a wealthy, East Coast elite. For a candidate short on biography, Midland solves a problem. There's no wartime heroism in Bush's past or a hardscrabble beginning. This is someone who concedes he was something of a mess until he was 40. For Bush's imagemakers, Midland provides terra firma, a place to anchor Bush in the popular imagination.

In an election in which authenticity is a must, Bush's attachment to Midland has the added value of being true. He spent his formative years there, before the family moved to Houston when he was 12, playing baseball, throwing rocks and riding his bicycle to the Roy Rogers movies downtown. But more telling is that after completing the trifecta of a privileged East Coast education--Andover, Yale and Harvard--Bush returned in 1975. "He decided these were just his kind of people," says boyhood chum Charlie Younger. Bush wore loafers without socks, but in the time he lived there, first as a young bachelor and then with Laura, he fit right in with a place known for casting a cold eye on uppity outsiders. "In Midland if you take yourself too seriously, someone will shut you down real fast," says Robert McCleskey, one of Bush's many friends who hail from and still live in that small city.

But if Bush's Midland bona fides are real, the campaign's mythologizing of the place is outsized. "It's a place where the sky is as big as your dreams," gushes an aide. The reality of Bush's Midland is not as ideal as advertised. "The rewards are pretty disproportionately given out," says Bush's boyhood next-door neighbor Randall Roden. "There was some diversity with Indians and Mexicans, but you didn't find them owning oil companies or running them." In the 1950s the Midland Bush knew was prosperous and virtually all white, a town legally segregated just like others in the South. Even now, if you scratch Midland's surface, it's easy to find pockets of good old-fashioned racism, even among old Bush family friends, some of whom on a recent trip were loose with their language. And while Bush never embraced those Midland values, neither was he well known for challenging the way things were.

The G.O.P. Convention will be the Bush team's chance to put the best version of their candidate and his past on display. Count on a film with romantic images of Midland. And count on the rest of the staging to be as laser-focused on making Bush seem noble, sincere and decent. For the convention in Philadelphia, the Bush team has chosen as its theme the careful "Renewing America's Purpose. Together." The real leitmotif--pushed by the campaign for many weeks--is much edgier: "George Bush Is a Different Kind of Republican." Mimicking almost exactly the language Bill Clinton used to stiff-arm his party's liberals eight years ago, it is an implicit sniff at the old kind of Republicans who will be gathered that week in Philadelphia.

Everywhere the symbols will align to send a comfortable message. The imperial raised platform will be gone, replaced by a lower, more accessible stage; Washington politicians will be shoved off to side stages and obscure time slots; and an entire classroom of inner-city kids will spotlight Bush's education proposals. A final night devoted to testimonials to the candidate will feature an African-American preacher; women will be prominently displayed in prime-time speaking roles every night.

To answer how Bush is different, campaign aides often mention Condoleezza Rice, the African-American woman who worked as a foreign-policy adviser to both Ronald Reagan and Dubya's father and who serves as Dubya's guru on the subject. Says Hughes: "So people look at that and say a young, smart, creative African-American woman, who has worked for two Presidents, believes George Bush ought to be the next President."

Against the cyclorama of policy proposals and political pageantry, the final task of his coordinated national debut will fall to the candidate himself. On the last night of the convention, Bush will declare he is a new kind of Republican, a "uniter not a divider." But he will have to take the next step and argue that the times demand what only he has to offer. As one of his advertising gurus put it bluntly last week, "We must come up with a problem to which he is the only solution."

Penning the transformational speech is Mike Gerson, the bespectacled former journalist who can quote passages from Martin Luther King more easily than the bromides of Barry Goldwater. An evangelical like Bush, a Hoosier who worked for Dan Coats, the former Indiana Senator, Gerson was one of the scribes of compassionate conservatism before it was given a moniker. Bush will call on his generation, the baby boomers, to lead the nation to take advantage of prosperous times. "I've seen the culture change once, and I can see it change again," the Texas Governor once told TIME about his fellow boomers. It will be a tricky moment, a chance for Bush to show the "good man" his imagemakers have worked so hard to highlight. But for a man who has at times grown smaller in stature the larger the stage, it will also be a moment when viewers will decide whether the man and the myth are the same.