This concept of the chief executive being the guy who gathers the brain trust whenever something goes haywire is illustrative of Bush's philosophy of government. It should be reactive, not active. Your typical liberal might respond with something like, "I intend to hold daily meetings on the state of the economy, where we track exactly this kind of thing and take measures the minute they're needed." But Bush believes that government should do as little as possible. It's supposed to handle major crises but otherwise stay out of everyone's hair.
That was pretty easy to do as governor. Running Texas isn't really a full-time job. When Bush kept bringing up his legislative successes as governor, we were supposed to be impressed. It's kind of anticlimactic when you learn that the Texas legislature only meets for 140 days, and even then they only hold a session every other year. Otherwise they're on hiatus. That really tends to lighten the workload. Governor Bush's typical workday included a two-hour afternoon break for napping, exercise, or playing video games.
The Election
In October, George's brother Jeb started making public declarations. Coincidentally enough, Jeb also happened to be governor of a southern state. And he began making predictions that would later fuel many a conspiracy theory. Jeb's exact words were: "I told my brother we are going to take Florida." And take it they did.
Florida fucked things up for everybody. There the vote margin between Bush and Gore was much smaller than the inherent margin of error, making it impossible to say definitively who had actually "won" the state. But the election laws had made no provision for such a situation, so the final outcome was left in the hands of Republican party apparatchiks. And since Bush was ahead of Gore by a pussy hair, the election officials appointed by brother Jeb made every effort to declare the contest over before the Democrats could do anything to change it.
Since Bush had already been declared the winner, even if only provisionally, there was no way in hell that the Republicans were willing to roll the dice again. There was just no possible upside, only downside. In contrast, the Democrats had no possible downside in another roll of the dice, so they insisted on recounts. Legal battles raged for weeks. The Florida state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Democrats, but the U.S. Supreme Court overruled them in a 5-4 decision. Thus the recounts were halted, Gore conceded, and Bush was declared the winner.
In the final tally, Bush won by garnering 50.5% of the Electoral College votes. That's pretty slim. And the popular vote spread was, uh, even slimmer. He beat Gore by a measly -0.51%, meaning that 540,520 more voters actually chose Gore over Bush. This negative margin of victory has only one precedent: the 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes, who received 200,000 votes fewer than his opponent. When a congressional commission selected Hayes, voters gave him the nickname "Rutherfraud."
During the transition, Dubya delegated the job of Cabinet interviews and selections to Cheney and headed back to his ranch in Crawford. There he had more important things to attend to, such as... well, it's actually kind of hard to imagine something more important than selecting your Cabinet. But let's just ignore that.
Maybe the Democrats were expecting too much. During the campaign, Bush had pledged to restore civility and meaningful bipartisanship to the governance of the nation. So they probably figured that it would only be fitting for Dubya to acknowledge his razor-thin mandate by selecting at least a handful of Democrats to serve in high-ranking Cabinet positions. Instead, he appointed exactly one -- Norman Mineta, former Commerce secretary under Clinton, now the Secretary of Transportation. Very inspiring.
Bush also nominated some diehard conservatives to other important posts, including John Ashcroft for Attorney General. Ashcroft was no friend to liberal causes. The man was a born-again Christian who held extremely puritanical views toward most everything: pornography, abortion, the drug war... Plus, he was just nuts. Evidently he believes that calico cats are in league with the Devil. And he thinks it's worthwhile to cover up Greco-Roman statuary in the Justice Department building so that he doesn't have to look at a naked breast on his way to work.
When asked about his pathetic nod toward bipartisanship, especially given the circumstances of the election, Bush seemed to indicate that appointing the lone Democrat was a truly magnanimous gesture:
"I believe the reason I'm standing here is because of the agenda I articulated during the course of the campaign, and I intend to take that agenda, that I tried to spell out as clearly as I could to the American people, to the halls of Congress."
Yeah, it could have been that, or maybe he was standing there as a result of the electoral equivalent of a coin toss. It was one of those.
Dubya's close friend, Kenny Boy
One of the very first things the administration did was convene a series of meetings with a bunch of high-level industry representatives to get their input on a new national energy policy. One key participant was Enron Corporation, a company with very long ties to George W. Bush and extremely well-represented in his administration. The Texas energy company's CEO, Ken Lay, had actually taken part in the transition process, helping to select members for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the government oversight board which regulates the energy industry. Also, several Enron officers wound up with cabinet-level positions, as well as appointments to less visible posts in his administration.
Bush and Enron and Ken Lay go way back. In addition to $113,800 for his Presidential campaign, the company and its CEO contributed a total of $146,500 to Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Covering their bases, they also gave a piddling $19,500 to the incumbent, Democrat Ann Richards. After the Enron scandal hit the fan, Bush attempted to mislead people into believing that he never had any particularly close relationship with Lay. The way Dubya explained it, Kenny Boy "was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994" who he barely even remembered meeting. Later somebody dug up a special birthday greeting that Governor Bush had mailed to Kenny Boy in 1997:
