All Eyes on Bush for Coming-Out Party

Words strain to describe the George W. Bush for president phenomenon, with its mix of hope, hype and hysteria. Superlatives fall short. Metaphors are overmatched.

It’s a juggernaut, say boosters. No, a soap bubble, say Democrats. No, a zeppelin, says one Republican rival, the Hindenburg itself!

On Saturday, after months of breathless buildup, the George W. Bush campaign becomes something else--a reality.

The Texas governor will fly to Iowa to eat barbecue, tour a neighborhood center, raise money for a pair of congressional backers and give a speech in a big barn. A Monday trip to New Hampshire follows. The travels will mark Bush’s first campaign foray outside his home state and, for all intents, the start of a Republican primary fight that has remained effectively frozen, awaiting this very moment.

The political world stands agog.

“There has never been a time, certainly in recent American history, where a candidate who had never run for president developed such a consensus around his candidacy before even campaigning,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster. “The delicate trick is to figure out how to lower expectations without seeming to be a great disappointment.”

Strategists for the governor are striving mightily.

“There are always people who want to hear and see everything right out of the box and we’re not going to do it that way,” said David Beckwith, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, purposefully low-balling the candidate’s intentions on this first voyage.

The point, Beckwith said, is merely to introduce the governor as a “potential” candidate for president. (Never mind the roughly $15 million Bush has raised, the scores of endorsements lassoed and his commanding lead in public opinion polls; technically, he is just “exploring” a bid.)

Still, with anticipation so stratospherically high, it seems even if Bush walks on water he will end up disappointing some people. “Ronald Reagan never faced these kind of expectations,” said Republican strategist Dan Schnur. “Hell, Abraham Lincoln didn’t face these kind of expectations.”

On the media-madness scale, Bush’s Iowa trip ranks somewhere between a papal visit and the Super Bowl. C-SPAN is planning live coverage; about 200 reporters and photographers from around the world have applied to the Bush campaign for credentials. The governor’s press entourage alone will be larger than the populations of 89 Iowa towns.

But even more than the media horde, Democrats are eagerly awaiting the performance of the GOP front-runner, convinced that Bush-in-the-flesh won’t be nearly as impressive to voters as Bush-in-the-press.

“George Bush is a soap bubble waiting to be popped,” sneered Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and occasional White House advisor. “He’s the biggest speculative bubble since tulips in Holland.”

No, insisted Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew, he’s like the Titanic: “Great theme music, nice boat, everyone wants to be on board. The question is, what happens when this unwieldy vessel runs into the iceberg that is Iowa and New Hampshire?”

Bush’s GOP rivals, meantime, are monitoring his inaugural journey with a combination of awe, envy and no small anticipation of their own.

“He can come out like the Lone Eagle Lindbergh and fly all the way to Paris,” said Patrick J. Buchanan. “Or this could be the Hindenburg on its flight to Lakehurst. So we’ll find that out.”

In some ways, political analyst Charles Cook suggested, this weekend could be just as important for Bush’s rivals as it is for the untested 52-year-old governor. “Right now, they’re just not getting nearly the contributions they need, let alone expected,” Cook said. “As long as the aura of inevitability stays wrapped around Bush, their candidacies will continue to suffer.”

Refusing to stand idly by, rivals Elizabeth Hanford Dole, Lamar Alexander and John R. Kasich all plan their own appearances Saturday in Iowa. They will address the World Pork Expo at the State Fair in Des Moines, hours before Bush shows up, and hope to capture at least some fleeting notice. But asked his most fervent wish for this weekend, an aide to one also-ran Republican replied, “A big earthquake in Iowa--with its epicenter right where Bush happens to be standing at the time.”

It may not take that sort of epic natural disaster to shake the Republican race. History promises that Bush will stumble at some point; the question is when. Most observers doubt it will come this weekend. For one thing, Bush has been cramming for weeks in preparation and is mindful of the scrutiny his every move will face. “He realizes people will be watching, and how he handles himself will become a subtext of this whole thing,” said spokesman Beckwith, in a further bit of understatement.

Oddly, in the weird way politics sometimes works, some even argue that expectations have gotten so out of hand the circumstances may actually work to Bush’s benefit. How?

“It’s the counter-spin,” explained Nelson Warfield, who tutored in the occasional illogic of political logic as press secretary for the 1996 GOP nominee, Bob Dole. “So many reporters are poised to write that Bush tripped that he may have the benefit of the counterintuitive argument that he actually did well.”

Regardless, after months apart from the fray, Bush will clearly enter a new phase of the presidential campaign, one that will expose him as a mortal candidate, warts and all, in a way he has so far avoided. In that sense, for all the buildup the next few days may be less important than what follows.

“I think the real question is six weeks from now,” said William Kristol, a leading arbiter of Republican opinion. “Are Bush’s [poll] numbers holding up? Does he have interesting things to say about the issues? What he faces is a two-month challenge, not just a two-day challenge.”