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The two themes--baseball and politics--merged nicely. Bush gave a talk in 1992 to the Republican Forum, a political club in North Dallas. "It was an amazing speech," says Jim Oberwetter, a friend who is now governmental-affairs director for Hunt Oil. "The only way I can describe it is as baseball patriotism. There was nothing political in the speech. Politics came with the person, so he did not have to talk about it."
Baseball was how he talked to his dad, raised his kids, made his money and ran for office. His political base was built on twin platforms: his Rangers celebrity and the prodigious campaigning he had done for his father throughout Texas in 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992. "His dad had a lot of races," says Laura. "...A lot of the people from his dad's races were still there."
All the while, hammers were ringing and saws whining at the new stadium in Arlington. The Ballpark fulfilled Bush's desire to do One Big Thing for Texas. Bush also knew it was increasing the value of his Rangers holdings, though he didn't realize how drastically. When his group sold the Rangers in 1998, Bush's initial $500,000 investment paid him almost $15 million. He had finally followed his dad's rule: Provide for your family before stepping into politics.
The Dallas years were marred, however, by a p.r. nightmare that arose from his sale of his Harken stock. In June 1990, Bush sold all 212,140 of his shares for $848,560, more than 2 1/2 times their original value. His mistake was to sell the stock less than two months before Harken reported a stunning $23 million second-quarter loss. (Bush says he did not know Harken was going to report the loss and thought he was selling into good news--the forthcoming announcement of a new drilling contract.) But it was widely assumed that Bush, a director of the company, had insider knowledge and dumped his stock in advance of the bad news. He compounded the problem by failing to file an SEC disclosure form.
The stock sale put him on the front pages and proved an embarrassment to his father's 1992 campaign. It also called attention to the little-known fact that in early 1990 Harken was awarded an exclusive contract from the government of Bahrain to drill for oil off that country's coast. With no offshore-drilling experience, Harken was an implausible choice. It was easy to assume that Bahrain was trying to curry favor with the President by giving business to a company tied to his son. Harken insiders say Bush actually opposed the deal (he was right; the wells turned out to be dry) and had no role in negotiating it. But the press had a field day drawing lines from the Middle East to the White House.
Bush was stung, but not fatally. An SEC investigation concluded that he had done nothing to merit punishment. One month after he was cleared, Bush resigned from Harken's board--and declared for Governor.
"I knew he was going to run again at some point," says Laura, "if ever the timing was right. We didn't know that his dad would be Vice President and President. That kept us from running for a lot of years." In 1992, when President Bush lost to Bill Clinton, "George and Jeb were freed, for the first time in their lives, to say what they thought about issues," she says.