The Bush Rolodex

You're the wildly popular Governor of Texas, the alpha dog in the G.O.P.'s presidential Iditarod, running 15 points ahead of Al Gore in the polls. It all looks perfect, except for those three small matters you can't do anything about: you look like your father, you sound like your father, and you're just one Herbert shy of sharing the old man's four-part name.

That name recognition isn't all bad--it helped make George Walker Bush the front runner--but he knows it won't take him where he wants to go. And so, at a time when he isn't saying much of anything else, George W. is working hard to signal that he's his own man. This is a neat trick in a family and country that value loyalty but worship winners. Which is why just about every time the Governor sits down with a group of pilgrims to Austin, he makes an important safety announcement. "This is not going to be George H.W. Bush, Part 2," he says. "It's going to be George W. Bush, Part 1."

In fact, George W.'s Rolodex isn't that different from his dad's. It's getting hard to keep count of all the veterans of the old Bush Administration who are now house-hunting in west Austin. But what's most striking about the selection the Governor has made from his father's staff is how shrewdly he has chosen. In nearly every case, Bush has tapped the young and the restless, the men and women who were most frustrated with President Bush's do-nothing approach to domestic policy. In the Bush White House, they were known as the Underground, the muscular and instinctive politicians who were more libertarian and diverse than the milkmen on whom the elder Bush relied. And they chafed during the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Republican Party alienated women and minorities. "This is the revenge of the deputies," says a veteran Bush aide. "These are the idealists who wanted to do more."

These people mirror Bush, his backers say. Like them, he trusts his gut, takes risks and casts a wide net for advice. He'll need all he can get, because when he finally breaks his policy silence, he'll have to make the case for evicting a party that might as well change its name to Dow 10,000. "This has been the cotton-candy decade," says Bush's chief economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, taste-testing a theme last week. "It's mostly spin, all sweet and no sweat. Yes, people are happy, but...we've let Social Security stagnate, Medicare fester and our national defenses deteriorate."

The G.O.P. has no ideological box big enough to hold the people Bush has gathered; conservatives of every stripe are pitching in. Lindsey, for example, may be a tax-cutting supply sider, but he spent his time at the Federal Reserve fighting inner-city red lining by major banks. Al Hubbard, a onetime deputy chief of staff to Dan Quayle, pushed for massive deregulation of business during the 1990 recession and now squires kindred spirits to Austin. Fred Steeper, the Republican pollster with the best fingertip feel for independents, is likely to be back for his third George W. campaign, even though, Steeper says, Bush never had him take a poll during his first four years in office because, "he likes to do what he thinks is right."

On foreign affairs, Bush has turned to Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice, a tough-minded Russia scholar who worked for his dad. Her group mixes Reagan-era hard liners with Bush veterans Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick, who is regarded as suspect by conservatives because of his long association with the ever pragmatic James Baker.

Bush knows he must decide where he stands right now, because he will have no time to think once the campaign is rolling. So he's holding what amounts to a months-long policy seminar and keeping his notes to himself. The result is a Washington guessing game: Whom is he talking to? Whom is he "listening to"? And whom for substance, whom for show? About those things, Bush is right to be discreet. Conservatives growl when they hear he's talking to anyone remotely moderate.

The shell game can't last. If he runs, Bush will have to build bridges between bitterly divided camps. Ugly fights are inevitable, which means that by the time this race is over, father and son may have something else in common: scar tissue.