Do you remember the article written by Gail Sheehy and published in Vanity Fair before the 2000 election? Her article was called
"The Accidental Candidate" and it had some interesting vignettes about Bush's childhood that struck me while he was making his speech calling for an escalation of troops in Iraq. The part of the article that came to mind was the part recounting W's constant wanting of "do-overs" until he either wore out the other kids (they let him win so they could go home) or until his momma made him stop (by calling him to dinner or taking him to task). He also had a habit of making new rules as he went along. No matter how you look at, W would never admit defeat and would do anything to either win or make it look like he had won.
He likes best to run in the hammering heat of the Texas noonday sun, and he hits the concrete running. No warm-up, no stretching. George Bush is a "red-ass in a hurry," as the sportswriters say in Texas, meaning he has a whole lot of energy and aggression to burn off or he's likely to blow. He has always been that way. When Barbara Bush took her 13-year-old son and his best friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf at her Houston club, George would start cursing if he didn't tee off well. His mother would tell him to quit it. By the third or fourth hole he would be yelling "Fuck this" until he had ensured that his mother would send him to the car.
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Once, after his mother banished him from the golf course, she turned to Hannah and declared, "That boy is going to have optical rectosis." What did that mean? "She said, ‘A shitty outlook on life.'"
Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."
He hasn't changed at all. His call for a surge is nothing more than what he did as a kid: redefine the rules of the game (and it is all a game to him) so he doesn't lose, at least not in his mind. He's a child who is afraid of looking weak and his mentality has never changed.
Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. "There was only one problem—my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "O.K., then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you—he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.
It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, ‘Play that one over,' or ‘I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you go that extra mile or that extra point ... you go to a whole new level."
He's doing the same thing. He's trying to change the rules of his war game, so his side wins. The sad part is, he's stopped playing for America's team a long time ago. He's out for himself, his friends and, more importantly, he's out to save his legacy so he will be thought a winner, if only in his own mind. And he doesn't care who has to die when he takes to it "a whole new level". All that matters is to him is that he doesn't feel like the loser he is.
edited to correct link
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