There is a definite pattern to shrub's adult life: fail, and a rich friend of the family--American or Saudi--suddenly appears with a sack of cash and junior's back in business, briefly. Then another failure, a fat-cat arrives...the kid's got a new title, a new company name...it has been an endless cycle of this failure's life. It is happening again, and the stakes have never been higher. Read this excellent analysis of this peculiarly bush cycle of failure and salvation from it:
He drilled a lot of holes in the ground of West Texas, and never made a big score. More than once, he was rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by a few rich men.
This is an old story, mentioned here not to revisit a well-known weak spot in Bush's resume but to suggest an analogy that might explain the recent role of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in Bush's re-election campaign.
In politics, too, Bush digs holes and needs rescuing from them.
The Swift Boat group has attacked Bush's opponent, John Kerry, these past few weeks with ads that paint Kerry's war record as a sham. Kerry, according to official Navy records, is a bona fide Vietnam War hero, winner of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.
But with money raised from several big Texas Republican contributors, and supposedly off the grid of the official Bush re-election campaign, the Swift Boat group has peddled the story that Kerry spent his 1969 tour of duty in Vietnam lying, running from danger and acquiring self-inflicted wounds.
It's a story filled with holes and, you'll excuse the expression, flip-flops by some veterans who in the past have praised Kerry's bravery and now dismiss it. George Elliot, one of the members of the attack group, was campaigning with Kerry in 1996. Another member of the group, retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, told an interviewer two years ago that Kerry was "a good man," and that his actions in winning the Silver Star "took guts." Now both say Kerry is a fraud.
Bush denies any connection with the Swift Boat group. But these ads have been the best thing to happen to his campaign in a year.
His war in Iraq has gone from bad to worse, the economy has refused to bounce, and he is trailing in several polls. But these slurs against Kerry - not to mention the slurs they imply against the dozen of his crewmates who lend eyewitness accounts of Kerry's bravery to his campaign - buoys Bush's poll numbers by double digits among a crucial voting group, veterans.
In many ways, the Swift Boat group has done for Bush's flagging presidential campaign what Republican contributors did for his flagging oil company, Arbusto Oil, back in the 1980s.
Like his oil ventures, Bush's presidency has yet to make a big score - not on the economy or against terror or on any front except the budget deficit, which he has increased profoundly.
And just as happened at the lowest ebb in his entrepreneurial days, when his first company was unable to pay its debts, along comes an infusion of support bankrolled by Texas Republicans.
In the 1980s, they were businessmen eager to curry favor with W.'s father, then-Vice President and future President George Bush. (Brokered by Texas oilman James Baker, the father's future campaign chairman and secretary of state, a deal was struck whereby W. merged his failing oil enterprise with a profitable one, and became president of the new company.)
In the recent Bush rescue, the bankrollers were businessmen of the same provenance who helped the Swift Boat group get together.
One was Texas commercial real estate executive Harlan Crow, an old friend of the Bush family and a member of the board of trustees - along with Baker and former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay - of George H.W. Bush's presidential library foundation.
The other is Texas home builder Bob J. Perry, a close friend of President Bush's political guru, Karl Rove. Each man gave more than $100,000 to the Swift Boat group.
Whether or not the dirtiest episode in the 2004 presidential campaign so far was born in the White House, its bankroller-midwives are no strangers there. And their role as behind-the-scenes helpers to a W. Bush in distress is nothing new in the president's story.
Yesterday, Bush said he was disavowing the Swift Boat ads. He stopped far short of criticizing them, and lumped them together with far less scuzzy campaign ads run by independent groups backing Kerry.
But it was a start toward dropping the attack. And Bush's timing has always been good.
Previously silent eyewitnesses have been coming forward steadily in the past few days to back Kerry's version of his Vietnam experiences. The Swift Boat critics have been caught in a number of contradictions and deceptions.
The story has done its damage. Like a stock at its peak value - something Bush recognizes, as he did when he made controversial sales in the late 1980s of his own Harken Energy oil company stocks, just weeks before reported financial losses would cut their value 75 percent - this would be a good time to cash out.
The negative ads may have flopped in finding dirt, but Bush, once again, seems poised to make out like a bandit on a dry hole.
