TIME: Do you all ever discuss policy or politics?
Bush: Sometimes. Not often. Jeb's an e-mail person. He'll e-mail me ideas, forward me things. I don't initiate e-mail, and I keep my address secret, but I respond on e-mail, especially to him. He e-mailed me some thoughts on Elian Gonzalez. He counseled me early on about Mexico. He urged me to move beyond the normal business relationship and into the more cultural relationship.
TIME: If he had won first, would he be in your shoes now?
Bush: Probably. A little hard to tell.
TIME: Would that bother you?
Bush: Wouldn't bother me in the least. You play the hand you're dealt.
TIME: Do you think the Bush name helped get you where you are in politics?
Bush: It cuts both ways. Some folks will say, there's George and Barbara's son, he must be interesting, let me listen. Others may say he's not done anything in his life, just running on his daddy's name. It's a mixed blessing ... Well, to me it's not a mixed blessing. It's a great blessing to be raised by George and Barbara Bush. TIME: Do you hate the word dynasty?
Bush: No, don't hate it. But it's not really true. Dynasty means something inherited. Both Jeb and I know you don't inherit a vote. You have to win a vote. We inherited a good name, but you don't inherit a vote.
TIME: Your father once said of the Kennedys, wait until my boys get out there. How does your family compare to theirs?
Bush: I admired the Kennedy brothers. They set a tone. They were very powerful figures and built a legacy. Ted Kennedy, I know he's anathema to conservatives, but he's in the Senate serving and very professional.
TIME: One thing you seem to share with your mother is that sometimes you carry a grudge.
Bush: Yeah, I remember some things, like anyone else. I remember. But I don't go out of my way to seek revenge. In 1992, I got some things off my chest. I was a warrior for my dad. But I'm a pretty forgiving person. To be a successful Governor, I had to have been.
TIME: You sometimes seem deliberately anti-intellectual.
Bush: I know it comes across that way. I don't think it's fair. How can you say I'm an anti-intellectual when I'm sitting next to [former Stanford provost and Russia expert] Condoleeza Rice on a regular basis? This will be an administration of people well suited to their jobs. I am secure enough that I want smart people around me. I made the leap from Texas schools to Andover, where a couple of people got dual 800s on their SATs. I'm comfortable with people who have high intellects.
TIME: You're saying you downplay your intellectual side?
Bush: It may have been. We're all sums of our experience. Kent Hance [who beat Bush for Congress in 1978] gave me a lesson on country-boy politics. He was a master at it, funny and belittling. I vowed never to get out-countried again.
TIME: So how do you assure folks you're smart enough to be President?
Bush: I'm confident of my intellect. I wouldn't be running if I wasn't. My job will not be to out-think everybody in my administration. My job will be to assemble an administration full of very capable and bright people.
TIME: What Presidents have done that well?
Bush: Reagan and Bush did a good job. Reagan had a very successful presidency because of his team. So did my dad. The foreign policy team of Cheney, Powell, Baker, Scowcroft. I also happen to like - I forgot what President it was - who liked to keep antenna out to other people. Roosevelt maybe.
TIME: Like Lyndon Johnson? He had the best and the brightest.
Bush: Well, no, there's a difference between having really smart people around and making right decisions. People also have to be confident of my judgment. They need to hear my speeches and get a sense of where I want to take this country.
TIME: But you talk about getting the smartest people to tell you what to do ...
Bush: No, no, no. Not tell me what to do. Make recommendations. Plus, I'm not going to have a group of people who say the same thing.
TIME: So what happens when they disagree?
Bush: These people don't decide for me. I'm going to have to decide. I will overrule my advisers. I've done that before. People are going to have to hear my explanations of why I make decisions. They'll hear the rationales and they'll have to make up their minds whether I'm the kind of person who decides upon a set of principles or am I going to keep changing my principles based on the political whims of the day. And that's my problem with the current administration, and that's my problem with who I'm running against. They keep changing based on politics. My job is to get good thinkers and get the best out of them.
TIME: With the failure of the missile-defense test, are you still convinced we should move quickly to build a defensive shield?
Bush: Yes, we need to move ahead. I hope I can convince Mr. Putin and the Europeans. I talked to [Russian Foreign Minister Igor] Ivanov about it, and I talked to him point-blank. You'd have been proud of me. I said here we are still trying to get out of a cold war mind-set. Please tell Mr. Putin I am willing to think differently. I noticed his rhetoric began to change a little. He began to talk about the most effective missile defense being the one that can detect and destroy on launch. And he talked about the new threats of outlaw nations, those are his words.
TIME: Why do you think your father lost in 1992?
Bush: It was a death of a thousand cuts, and it took a thousand to defeat him. He couldn't get his base intact. And the cause of that was breaking the "read my lips" tax pledge.
TIME: But didn't his compromise on taxes help set groundwork for the recovery?
Bush: Some economists say it helped. I think the lesson is not to give a Shermanesque pledge during a campaign.
TIME: But having made it, was he right to compromise later?
Bush: I would have advised him not to have done it, as political advice.
TIME: But that's making a policy for political reasons.
Bush: As I said, that would have been my political advice. His change opened things to Patrick J. Buchanan. There were other reasons he lost. Perot. Third, there was the beginning of a generational change. Fourth, he did not wisely spend political capital earned from Desert Storm on domestic politics, so he got painted as out of touch. Fifth, his campaign wasn't designed well. And part of the reason he lost was history. He was at the end of a very long run.
TIME: Your father said in a recent interview that it was mainly the forces of history, and that these forces were now going to help you. Were you upset he didn't give more weight to your own attributes?
Bush: I wasn't mad. He was being modest. He wasn't going to be bragging on his son. It's part of the family heritage. He's a little gun-shy to be bragging about me because he doesn't want somehow the critics to be saying, there he is, promoting his son.
TIME: You stress that you are a "new kind of Republican." How is that different from the old type?
Bush: The old types were viewed, fairly or not, as being against things. Our party kind of slipped into not being for things. Education is an example. We were viewed as being against public schools. Perception became reality in this case.
TIME: Does that apply to Reagan? Your father?
Bush: Listen, I'm not dealing in history, I'm dealing in the short term. I'm talking about how Republicans have been defined by a politically deft President. I'm faced with perceptions that Republicans don't care about newly arrived immigrants. I do care about them.
TIME: So you're talking about the congressional Republicans?
Bush: You're trying to get me to name names. I'm not. I'm going to have to be working with these folks.
TIME: What are your feelings about affirmative action?
Bush: The best thing to do is to educate every child and to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. We can have affirmative programs that enhance people's chance to access the middle class without quotas and without pitting race against race. We were the first state to put a rule in place that the top 10% of each high school class could go to a state university. I call it affirmative access. This is going to enhance the ability of state universities to attract minorities. The pool of applicants must be increased for small-business ownership. I don't mind measuring, I don't mind a scorecard that says, "Whoa, why is every contract going to white firms?" But you can do it without quotas.
TIME: Do you think you benefited by a different, older version of affirmative action, an old-boy's network, when you got into college and went into business?
Bush: I don't know. Maybe. And yes, racism exists. I'm not going to be making policy based on guilt. The fundamental question in certain neighborhoods is, how do we break a sense that the system isn't meant for me? You need mentoring programs. Part of it has to do with there isn't the entrepreneurial system being passed from one generation to the next.
TIME: The way it was passed from your grandfather to your father to you?
Bush: No question. I learned at the knee of a good father.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040906/ <--- Time Magazine's interview with Bush.