Bush Unplugged

The George W. Bush revealed in two years of surreptitiously recorded private conversations with a former friend is more complicated and appealing than the uncompromising, language-mangling leader whom Americans are accustomed to hearing. His struggle to fit his morality to his politics is illuminating, if not exactly comforting.

The Bush on the tapes -- which begin in 1998, when he was running for a second term as Texas governor, and continue into 2000 and his run for the Republican presidential nomination -- believes homosexuality is a sin but is unwilling to “kick gays” to win votes from religious conservatives because he understands human frailty. He may have smoked marijuana when he was young, but he won’t admit it to reporters because that might lead kids down a dangerous path. And never mind that turn-the-other-cheek stuff, the born-again Bush is not afraid to sabotage political rivals who hit below the belt on the campaign trail.

The conversations -- segments from a dozen tape recordings made by onetime Bush family political advisor Doug Wead and played first for the New York Times -- display flashes of the sort of personality quirks that endear Bush to his supporters and frighten his critics.

Bush tells Wead, “The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check” and says he stays humble by reading it every day. Yet he casts himself in grandiose terms, boasting that his popularity will “change Texas politics forever” by catapulting coattail Republicans to success when he wins his second term as governor.

While campaigning in 2000, he says he favored John Ashcroft as a vice presidential running mate because the right-wing senator “wouldn’t say ugly things about me,” suggesting that then, as now, he saw loyalty as the preferred litmus test for political picks.

And he demonstrates a political savvy that suggests that college grades and the ability to find Latvia on a map aren’t the only measures of brilliance. Bush understands -- in the same way Bill Clinton did -- that the American electorate is eager to embrace the underdog, the fallible, the redeemed, and he manages to turn his self-described “wild behavior” as a young man into a political asset.

“I’ve sinned and I’ve learned” becomes his campaign mantra. He tells Wead, and now us, “That’s part of my shtick, which is, ‘Look, we have all made mistakes.’ ”

Odd that the same man, once in office, would be incapable of admitting them.