Campaign Book Report--Ivins and Dubose on Bush
By Jacob Weisberg
Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush
By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
Random House, 179 pages, $19.95
No one would accuse this book of being fair-minded. It's a
mean-spirited, one-sided assault by a pair of serpent-tongued Texas
liberals who regard Bush as an affable near-moron who'd probably be
tending bar somewhere if he had a different last name. It's also,
in my opinion, the best of the three books written on the subject
so far (or five if you count the Fortunate Son fraud and Bush's own
subcontracted autobiography). Shrub is worth reading even if you
have a considerably higher opinion of Dubya than the authors do.
The reason is that this trigger-happy indictment does something
that the two other, more balanced and conventional biographies (W
by Elizabeth Mitchell and First Son by Bill Minutaglio) don't do,
or at least don't do very well: It critically evaluates Bush's
public record against the background of Texas' peculiar political
culture. While appreciating the comic value of Texas's
eccentricities, the authors do seem to wish their state were more
like Vermont. They deplore living among fellow citizens who are
happy to accept minimal and low-quality public services as the
price of low taxes. With mordant wit, they call Texas a "laboratory
for bad government" and "Mississippi with good roads."