A week after George W. Bush was re-elected president, he chose Alberto Gonzales, a Mexican American, to be the next Attorney General. A week later, he selected Condoleezza Rice, an African-American woman, to be Secretary of State and Margaret Spellings, a white woman, to be the next Secretary of Education. Then he selected Carlos Gutierrez, a Cuban American, as Secretary of Commerce. It took Bush a month before he named a standard-issue white male, Governor Mike Johanns of
Nebraska, as Agriculture Secretary. Since then, Bush has announced that two Asian Americans, Norman Mineta at Transportation and Elaine Chao at Labor, will remain at their posts. The President is not done naming yet–there are more Cabinet positions and at least one Supreme Court nomination to come–but no one will be surprised if Bush selects people who are neither white nor male.
The President has said privately he doubts that he will ever get credit for this eruption of American diversity. But admirably, he has never really asked for credit. He hasn’t gone around trumpeting the fact that during his first term, the Secretary of State and the National Security Adviser were the first African Americans to hold those positions. Or that there were four women in his Cabinet. Or that Gonzales would be the first Hispanic Attorney General. “He doesn’t think that way,” says Karl Rove. “He thinks in terms of personal stories. When we learned [that Commerce Secretary] Don Evans wanted to leave, the President mentioned Gutierrez–not because the guy is Hispanic but because the President loves the story: a guy who starts at the bottom at Kellogg’s [as a truck driver delivering Frosted Flakes in Mexico] and rises all the way to CEO of the company.”
Of course, as the Bernard Kerik fiasco has demonstrated, a dramatic up-by-the-bootstraps story shouldn’t be the only qualification for a presidential appointment. But in this honeymoon season, give credit where credit is due: George W. Bush has not only appointed the two most diverse Cabinets in U.S. history, he has also raised the possibility that the Republican Party–long a pale-male refuge–could become a more attractive option for traditionally Democratic constituencies like women and the rapidly growing nonwhite electorate. “These appointments mean a lot in the Latino community,” says Congressman Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “The joke has been that we’re the afterthought. We get HUD. Clinton broadened that a little by appointing Federico Peña as Secretary of Transportation. But a Hispanic Attorney General–that means something. And even Commerce Secretary–that’s a job that usually goes to a white businessman. These aren’t ‘tokens.’ This is real.”
In a way, President Bush is the beneficiary of 40 years of Democratic policy–not just affirmative action, which helped create a broader, deeper pool of successful nonwhite college graduates, but also the Democratic Party’s historic support for civil rights legislation, the feminist revolution and the easing of strict immigration policies in the 1960s, policies long opposed by many Republicans. But the Bush Cabinets have also been very much a reflection of who George W. Bush is and always has been.
He has always been a gutbucket populist egalitarian. That was, in part, a Texas rebellion against the starchy Greenwich, Conn., aristocracy of his family, but it was also hardwired, a consequence of Bush’s native predilection for studying people rather than books. His bright-line test was intellectual pretense. If you weren’t stuffy, you were O.K. “George’s little Texas group [was] more friendly than their Northern counterparts,” an African-American classmate at Andover is quoted as saying in Peter and Rochelle Schweizer’s comprehensive family history, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty. “With respect to the African-American guys in class, he got along very well with them.”
His feelings about women were, undoubtedly, more complicated and strongly influenced by family history. There is an innate fierceness to the Bush women. When the President’s mother first came to the family, her mother-in-law was worried that Barbara wasn’t tough enough because of her diffidence on the tennis court: “She won’t play net!” The family’s assumption was that women were as strong and smart as men and superior when it came to loyalty. “He was influenced by growing up where he did, too,” says Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who maintains that women in Texas were different from their prissy Eastern and Southern sisters. “We have a tradition of strong women who ran big ranches and businesses.” There is still a fair amount of free-range machismo in Texas, Hutchison concedes, but the President is different from most men: “He doesn’t talk to a woman as if he’s talking to a woman. He doesn’t trivialize or condescend. He never condescended to Ann Richards when he ran against her for Governor. Women notice that.”
There is a difference between egalitarianism and liberalism. “He’s a small-D democrat,” says John DiIulio, who served as Bush’s director of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives–and left because of the Bush Administration’s inability to act on its promises to the urban poor. “He really loves people, and he doesn’t discriminate.” But there is a disconnect between sentiment and action. Bush talked passionately about faith-based social programs but wasn’t willing to make the necessary compromises to get his plan through Congress. Often, the President’s small-D democracy leads him to conservative conclusions. He doesn’t make distinctions by race, and therefore he doesn’t take much stock in programs, like affirmative action, that do. He sees poverty as the absence of opportunity, not as a racial issue. He believes a better education will rectify the difference.
Then again, informality may be the ultimate American ideology–and Bush’s plainspoken, easygoing demeanor does have policy implications. It sends a clear message of acceptance to the newest immigrants. “My father met the President,” says Bobby Jindal, a young Louisiana Republican and the first Indian American to be elected to Congress in nearly five decades. “He’s a building contractor, and he was working on hurricane repair in Florida. Jeb Bush and the President came to his site one day, and he took pictures with both. The picture with Jeb was standard meet and greet. With the President, it was completely different: the two of them are standing there, with their hands in their pockets, laughing about something like they’re best friends. My dad is wearing his baseball cap, and I asked him why he didn’t take his cap off and show more respect. ‘I forgot he was the President,’ my father said. ‘He just seemed like a regular guy.’ A lot of immigrants like my dad just simply feel comfortable with the man.”
The comfort level seems to have increased most dramatically in the Hispanic community, which gave the President 40% of its vote in 2004, up from 35% in 2000. Bush’s personal popularity was reinforced by brother Jeb, who speaks fluent Spanish and was a constant presence on Spanish-language television during the campaign. In addition, Karl Rove made a conscious effort to wean Hispanic voters from their traditional home in the Democratic Party. “I think half the Latino small businessmen in my district have been given free trips to Washington to meet the President,” says Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat. There is also a growing sense that there are more opportunities in the Republican Party for Hispanics. “We Democrats had 10 African Americans speak in prime time at our convention and only two Latinos,” Sanchez says. “Our party hasn’t figured out yet that Latinos are now swing voters.”
They swing between a Democratic tradition of social services and the Republican proffer of lower taxes and social conservatism on issues like abortion and gay marriage. The lower taxes appeal to a new generation of college-educated and entrepreneurial Hispanic business owners; the social issues appeal to the older generation of devout Roman Catholics and also to the growing Hispanic Pentecostal movement. “I am not sure many of our people are familiar with the Bush ‘ownership society’ ideas yet,” says Abel Maldonado, a young Republican state senator from California. “I don’t know how they’ll feel about Social Security privatization or MediSaver accounts, but I do know this: everyone who comes across that border wants to start a business–and the Republicans are the party of business.”
In the end, the President’s success is personal, not philosophical. It is something people feel rather than think about. Rod Paige, the outgoing Secretary of Education, felt it the first time he met Bush. “It was at an African-American fund raiser for his father in 1988. There were about 700 of us, and he was about the only white guy there. Now, we had seen white Republicans in a room full of black folks before, and you could usually count on a fair amount of, well, discomfort. There was none of that with W. I don’t remember a thing he said. I just remember he was hanging out, easy, with the rest of us.” •
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