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And he was off. As Bush traveled the state, running as a baseball man and stadium builder as well as Famous Son, moving toward an upset of popular incumbent Ann Richards, he applied the lessons he'd learned from his father, his mother, Kent Hance, Lee Atwater: Trust your instincts, stay on message, be down-home, enforce discipline. His campaign deftly exploited Texans' fear of crime, though crime had been dropping in the state for years (somewhere, Atwater was smiling). Richards baited Bush mercilessly, calling him an elitist and a "Shrub," and everyone expected Bush to lose his famous temper. He never did. He stayed sunny and folksy and on message all the way to the statehouse.
The campaign trail brought back memories--long days and nights in the car with his father on the endless highways of 1964 and 1970, and aboard the campaign planes of the '80s. They reminded Bush of the distance he'd traveled. "His feelings were sort of hurt because Barbara and Jenna, who were 13, did not really want to travel with him," says Laura. One trip brought the family to the steps of the county courthouse in the North Texas town of Quanah, and Bush remembered being there with his dad 30 years before. The girls weren't impressed. But an old man came up and told him, "I remember you when you were here last time." "It was very touching for him," Laura says. "It made him want to weep." He had always figured he had more in common with blunt, sharp-eyed Barbara Bush. "I've got a lot of my mother in me," he says. But at that moment, he surely was his father's son.