George W. Bush must be feeling at least a tiny bit of heat from John McCain, since he's felt compelled to come up with a reason that he would make a better president than the senator from Arizona.
And the winner is . . ."I've had chief executive experience," says Bush. "I know how to set goals. I know how to make decisions. I know how to rally people."
Now a cynic might say Bush's background would prove useful only if Congress decides to start behaving like the Texas legislature and meet every other year. But hey, you work with what you have.
"The next president of the United States must have executive experience; we don't need people learning on the job," said Carroll Campbell, the former governor of South Carolina, driving the message home at a Bush rally in Seneca, S.C., this week.
People there had been standing packed in a hot American Legion hall for two hours waiting for Bush. They were almost all committed Bush supporters, who said they had decided to support the governor over McCain and the other Republicans because:
"His mother was one of the best first ladies."
"I liked his father."
"He's got a lot of the same beliefs as his father had."
Nobody mentioned executive experience.
It's pretty apparent that Bush became the odds-on favorite to get the Republican nomination because he was born with a famous political name. He happened to start running for president at a time when the campaign began so early that asking voters to name their favorite candidate was like asking them for their favorite poet. Bush, the Robert Frost of political name recognition, won the first polls easily, and after that things just started snowballing. He got more and more support because, in the words of a woman in a diner in Easley, S.C., "he's popular."
Naturally, the campaign needs a more impressive story arc. Bush and his surrogates would like to attribute his success as a presidential candidate to his record as governor, which includes making Texas one of 49 states to lower taxes over the last five years and one of 50 that slashed welfare rolls.
Texas has prospered under the current governor, but it's hard to tell how much of that has to do with a national economy so stupendous it would have required a herculean effort to fail. Last year the number of crimes in the state dropped 5.2 percent. But South Dakota's crime rate went down 19 percent, and you don't see a presidential boom for Gov. William Janklow.
Bush's best assets -- an energetic campaign style and great timing -- will take you a lot further politically than a genius for management. (Just ask the other governors.) At the rally in Seneca, one of the most well-informed voters in the audience seemed to be Haynie Floyd, who is in the pest control business. Floyd said he was disappointed that Bush hadn't talked more about the environment, but he felt he had the best character for the job.
"McCain is sometime down the road going to show his temper," the exterminator said. "Now when Bush couldn't answer that question about the world leaders on TV, he didn't lose his temper. I don't know what McCain would have done."
Now imagine what would have happened to Al Gore if he'd gotten caught on TV drawing a blank on the name of the prime minister of India and calling the head of Pakistan "General . . . general." How many people think it would have been taken as a sign of presidential temperament that he didn't slug the interviewer?
The polls in New Hampshire show McCain making substantial progress in the race for the presidential nomination. But he's still way, way behind Bush in the Luck Sweepstakes.