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Forget education, Social Security, health care, tax cuts, further economic progress, compassionate whateverism, crime, and family values. The only thing that matters in Presidential politics in the year 2000 -- and in most of the elections of the past few decades -- is this: Cool guy wins.
Forced to decide between Granite Gore and Breezy Bush, the gut-voting electorate will gravitate toward the man suppressing a smirk. With every American over 2 desperately seeking hipness, nobody wants to line up with a dork -- unless the alternative is a bigger dork.
Remember when Big George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis? Big George with his tortured syntax and upper-crust Yankee vagueness -- didn't have the vision thing, didn't know the price of milk -- still came off as a whole lot cooler than the stern governor of Massachusetts. Bush was tall and lean (still is), was a fighter pilot in World War II, ran the Central Intelligence Agency, and drove his cigarette boat really fast up there in Maine. Dukakis was short (still is), dweebily pontificating, and all too whipped by his slightly out-of-control wife. And when he made the decidedly goofy decision to ride around in a tank with a Rocky the Squirrel hat on, the die was cast.
ALL SHOOK UP. Next election, in 1992, Big George was up against an opponent of a sort that he had never seen before. Young, Elvis-hip, pain-feelin', bit of a scamp (if only we knew), and to many, irresistibly attractive. An icon of the boomer generation (we knew this guy) and a product of the common life. Bam. Bye, Big George.
In 1996, despite burgeoning scandals and pointed failures, Bill Clinton was still the man. Sure, Bob Dole was darkly cool -- an edgy war hero with a biting sense of self-deprecating humor. But the public rarely saw that, and Bill had the momentum of office and a lot of Asian money behind him. If the defining moment in the Bush-Dukakis contest was the weenie-in-a-tank photo, in the Clinton-Dole face-off it was the picture of a frail-looking Dole in a bathing suit and T-shirt relaxing in Florida. Skinny legs may have cost him the election.
On Aug. 3 in Philadelphia, George W. Bush had a string of challenges: Prove you have substance, prove you can relate without appearing stiff or arrogant, prove you're the cool guy.
The video bio that preceded his entry was mostly cool, portraying a man at ease with himself whom you believed when he said: "I like to laugh -- and I like to laugh with people." But introducing memories of his sibling Robin, who died at an early age, was uncool, cheesy, and reminiscent of Al Gore at the 1996 Democratic Convention invoking a sister killed by cancer. And who really believed that young Bush, the oil-field Yalie, was speaking from the heart when he said: "Somebody's who's newly arrived in America can be as American as someone who has been here for generations"?
STANDING TALL. But then the flawed video ended, and he was suddenly there, master of a basketball and hockey arena wild with stomping, screaming Republicans and a shirt-sleeved Big George in the stands applauding. When the three-minute standing ovation ended, George W. Bush stood at the threshold of his future -- and he didn't stumble. Standing ramrod straight, he said: "Mr. Chairman, delegates, I proudly accept your nomination," and you knew then this game is his to lose.
Echoing a theme sounded on the night of Aug. 2 by his running mate, Dick Cheney, Bush signaled that he will not mount an outright assault on our lovable, bad-boy President -- and that in itself is a brilliant strategy if he and his cohorts can stick to it. "Our current President embodied the potential of a generation. So many talents. So much charm. Such great skill. But, in the end, to what end? So much promise, to no great purpose."
For the next hour, Bush delivered a high-minded, inclusive, and occasionally courageous speech that spoke to Americans far beyond the walls of the First Union Center -- reassuring the old, comforting the downtrodden, and mollifying the faithful. Throughout the primaries and right up until his acceptance speech, the question about Dubya has been: "Is he just an empty suit avenging his father?"
Sure he's out to right the wrong that he feels was done to his father, whom he calls "the most decent man I have ever known." But the George W. Bush whom America met on Aug. 3 in Philadelphia is much more than the leader of a patrician posse. He's his own guy. He's a cool guy. And cool guys win.
Scotti is Business Week senior editor for government and sports business Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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