Here’s One Son Even a President Can Love

Ever since George Bush became a serious candidate for President, he and his handlers have worked hard developing one image for him:

George Bush is a regular guy. He is just another down-home, ordinary, middle-class American who likes barbecue, boating and beer.

Every now and then, that image has come under attack. Texas Democrat Jim Hightower once said of Bush’s preppy millionaire background: “He was born on third base and now he thinks he hit a home run.”

Now, however, George Bush has stumbled upon on a chance to once and for all cement his image as a regular Joe.

While others think the involvement of his son, Neil, in the Silverado savings and loan scandal might hurt Bush, I think the opposite is true.

I think Bush now has the opportunity to do what most middle-class Americans do every day: Sit around and complain about how rotten their kids have turned out.

You probably have heard the conversations in the lunchroom at work or on the assembly line or over the back fence. They go like this:

“You know what that kid of mine did last week? Goes into my pants pockets and takes my car keys--doesn’t ask, takes!--drives to the beach with five of his rotten punk friends, gets loaded and I get a call at 4 in the morning, can I come down and bail him out for drunk and disorderly?”

“You thinks that’s bad?” somebody else joins in. “Angela, my youngest, she goes to a Motley Crue concert--where they get these names, I don’t know--and she disappears and we think she’s dead someplace. Then yesterday we get a call from Pasadena, says she’s married to a roadie and could we send her the money from her college fund and her Madonna tapes?”

In the past, George Bush had little to add to such conversations. But now he can say:

“Hey, that’s nothing. I got a kid, my boy, Neil. When he’s 30, they offer him a job on a savings and loan board of directors. Kid can barely balance a checkbook, but all of a sudden he thinks he’s Louis Rukeyser.

“Does it occur to him they’re using him for his name, for his connection to me? He’s not sure. He thinks maybe they like his suits. His haircut. The way he ties his tie.

“He’s a trusting kid, my Neil. Goes into business with these two guys: one puts up $150,000, one puts up $10,000 and my son, the big-shot financier, he puts up $100. The guy who puts up the 150 grand, he gets 6.25% of the company. My son for his C-note, he gets 32.8%. And it’s all in writing. A paper trail that a blind man can follow!

“But the kid is not a bad kid, right? He likes to help people. And federal regulators are now saying he has all these conflicts of interest, such as approving $106 million in loans to one of his business partners.

“OK, so that’s water over the dam. But Silverado fails in December, gonna cost the taxpayers maybe a billion dollars, and what does my kid do? He goes out and he buys a new $550,000 home.

“The press is all over him like flies on flypaper, but he goes out and buys a mansion! I swear, sometimes that boy makes Dan Quayle look like an intellectual.”

OK, OK, so maybe George Bush wouldn’t put it exactly that way. But if you go through all the recent profiles and interviews, a certain image of Neil Bush does emerge:

* Neil Bush: “I don’t understand politics . . . I probably am guilty of not being the savviest political guy in the Bush family.”

* Neil Bush “told the Denver Post in an interview that he probably wouldn’t have understood Silverado’s financial statements had he seen them.”

* Time magazine: “. . . Bush family friends say Neil never lost his naivete.”

* Newsweek magazine: “A teacher at St. Albans, the prestigious Washington prep school he attended, once told his parents Neil might never graduate.”

* Office of Thrift Supervision: Neil Bush was “unqualified and untrained” to serve on Silverado’s board of directors.

* Time magazine: “After his sobering week, there remained an air of unreality about Neil . . . he pondered a new and ironic goal: running for Congress.”

Got the image yet? Try this: Neil Bush is as nice as pie and about as bright. He is the lovable lunkhead of the Bush family. A lunkhead that, at best, fell in with a bunch of sharpies who played him like a piccolo.

Does that make Neil blameless? Of course not. He knew he was getting a lot of nice treatment because he was George Bush’s son. Nobody is that naive.

But he liked the life. The attention. The money. The little extras that come with being the son of a famous man.

And though he thinks he is now being investigated simply because he is the President’s son, he would not trade places with anybody in the world.

“I’ve been able to meet Michael Jackson,” he said recently. “And I’ve flown in the presidential helicopter. I think the good outweighs the bad.”

And what ordinary American father couldn’t love a kid like that?