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Like his dad, Bush had no patience running for small-time local offices; no one gave him much chance of winning his race. But he was a natural--handsome, "not the smartest guy in the world but smart enough," as Younger says, blessed with an honest love of pressing the flesh. He won the G.O.P. primary, then ran against state senator Kent Hance, who used a populist tactic Bush would never forget. Hance compared his own West Texas "credentials" with Bush's Andover-Yale-Harvard ones. When Hance got through with him, Bush smelled like some exotic houseplant on a New England windowsill. "I remember going to the American Agricultural Convention in the Lubbock Coliseum," says Bush. "I was surrounded by farmers. They wanted to talk about the Trilateral Commission. And I look over their shoulders, and there was Hance. I take my hat off to him." Bush lost, 47% to 53%. Never again would he let a rival paint him as an elitist. "George has got a lot folksier since then," says O'Neill.
Bush went back into oil. He started hiring for his own company, Arbusto (Spanish for bush), raising money from a network of East Coast backers who were close to his father and uncle, money manager Jonathan Bush. Among them were drugstore tycoon Lewis Lehrman, who lost a bid for Governor of New York in 1982; venture capitalist William H. Draper III, who would become president of the U.S. Export-Import Bank during the Reagan Administration; and Celanese CEO John Macomber, who later landed the same post.
If connections got him in the door, talent sealed the deal. "The politician was in him," says Jim McAninch, who ran Bush's drilling operations in the early days. "He was a great promoter and a great money raiser." He also had, as a former colleague puts it, "a photogenic memory"--a malapropism that captures his gift for the social side of life, his Clintonian ability to remember names of countless people he has met only briefly.
As CEO of Arbusto, Bush developed the same management style he uses today, a flat structure with easy access to the boss who guides but doesn't sweat the details. "He hires good men, and lets 'em do their job," says McAninch. "He had a lot of oil-field savvy even though he didn't have a technical background." In its first five years, Arbusto drilled 95 wells, hitting oil or gas about 50% of the time, an average performance. "George used to say, 'Man, we need a company maker,'" recalls Dickey, who discovered some vast oil fields in later years, working for other companies. "I always felt bad I never found one for him. He was the best boss I ever had."