By Rick Perlstein

February 3, 2002 | 7:00 p.m

Remember the Bush vacation?

Last year. August. The "family ranch" in rural Crawford, Tex. The Presidential-esque seal behind the press secretary's platform, "WESTERN WHITE HOUSE" branded across the bottom; the Rancher in Chief snipping at reporters wondering why the man who promised to bring a new dignity to Washington was abandoning the capital for a solid month after hardly half a year in office, saying that "they don't understand the definition of work … I'm getting a lot of work done." (The more friendly among the media helped White House Presidential Counsel Karen Hughes revive a Reagan-era phrase: the "working vacation.") We wise citizens of the Republic of Media reveled in the sheer histrionics of it all. The New Republic reported that George W. bought this "family" homestead way back in 1997-the property developed alongside the younger Bush's Presidential ambitions, completed just in time to serve as stage-set for his 2000 campaign video. His August 2001 command performance there did not disappoint. Ryan Liz of TNR recorded the Great Man's chatter upon arrival: "It's nice to be home.... This is my home.... It's good to be home.... This is where you come home... I like my own home"-Texas being a place, he assured his interlocutors, where "a neighbor means more than just somebody living next-door to somebody else." Mr. Bush's nearest neighbor in Crawford, it turned out, was several miles away. New Yorkers made many jokes about George W. Bush-less a cowboy than the handpicked favorite of Wall Street Republicans-during his weeks in Texas. As once was their wont. But if George W. Bush, home on the range, was to many New Yorkers hilarious, his lingering sojourn in Texas also felt devious: proof positive that our President would play to the rubes a thousand times before even deigning to set foot in the nation's largest city. It was a symbolic moment in the souring of a political relationship that was never too sugary to begin with. He hated us; everyone knew that. Even the gnarliest stereotype of the right-wing outer-borough hard-hat couldn't have been too pleased with the guy. Then, the apocalypse. Hardly had the first vigil for Sept. 11 hit the pavement when Mr. Bush showed up at Ground Zero-there had been some complaining that he hadn't made a first-day Churchillian walk-through-and mounted those wasted ramparts with that scratchy megaphone in his right hand and a retired old fireman at his right. "We can't hear you," brayed a bystander as his speech began; "I can hear you !" he brayed back. "The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!" "Bush! Bush! Bush!" the New York crowd chanted then; and many are still prepared to chant it now. It was as if he had turned his back on his Texas fetish and made room in his heart for us. George W. Bush had a last laugh of sorts vis-à-vis the snarky Manhattan types, were anyone inclined to laugh: Not only did this city-perhaps even its liberals-join the rest of the nation in branding this man a hero; now even his staged histrionics have been adjudged the mark of a wise and brave statesman. Since Sept. 11, New York has been loving George W. Bush. But that brings me, in a roundabout way, to my question: Can this marriage be saved? Four months and change is a not-untypical length of time for a passionate romance to burn itself out. We all know how it happens: The besotted parties wipe the stars out of their eyes, see their partners clear for the first time-and wonder, "Why did we think we ever had anything in common in the first place?" No one doubted that Bush was going to make a Republican speech last night. The question was whether he would gesture towards anything resembling a New York Republican kind of speech last night-a speech a Pataki, or even a Bloomberg, could take home to mother: one that could help lure, say, the upstate unemployed into the former's camp in his reelection fight next year with generous doses of truly compassionate conservatism; or something that could provide some kind of cover for the latter, the liberal-leaning former Democrat for whom a solid working relationship with the White House will be so crucial in the year to come to rebuild downtown. And, in a sense, the speech half-delivered. Mr. Bush went into the State of the Union staring down the barrel of some ugly facts. An NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll reported that two in five Americans already feel the nation is back to normal or nearly normal. Six of 10 think President Bush's major domestic initiative-the expedited $1.35 trillion tax cut-shouldn't be delayed (and even Republicans are evenly split on the issue), and agree with the President, who has declared that will happen "over my dead body." Karl Rove has declared that Mr. Bush's success in fighting the war will be enough to sustain the Republicans in the 2002 elections. But 44 percent of Americans-a reasonable number in any election-say they will judge the success of the war against terrorism on the increasingly dicey proposition of whether Osama Bin Laden is captured. Crawford's pieties-the "red-state" priorities-of God and Country and Patriotism seem to be giving way to the old Democratic priorities of jobs, jobs, jobs. The surveys show Americans now slightly more concerned with the economy than with terrorism; and that, perhaps, is why a Fox News poll reported that "if the election were held today," only 49 percent of Americans would vote for Bush-despite his wartime approval ratings upwards of 80 percent. And so, not surprisingly, beyond the expected clarion wartime calls to patriotism and service, there was something almost Clintonian about it, or, if you will, Republican moderate. Much of it was the economy, stupid-with its fervent appeals to Clinton-style national service, to welfarist appeals to thin the gap between the haves and the have-nots, to "economic security" over "economic stimulus." But I fear it was also Clintonian, in the more unwelcome sense of the term, then any Republican would want to admit. It was not, in a word, a trustworthy speech. Where once George Bush played Crawford, Texas to the hilt-traveling incessantly through the "heartland," not even giving the Northeast, which gave him nothing on election Tuesday, the time of day-he now plays down the tropes of folksy Southwestern populism. But where Texas was but empty window dressing back in August, now he plays down the histrionics. Now "Texas" is in the background. But the things Texas represents more and more pulls the strings. There is Enron, for one thing. The Bush family may be relative newcomers, as things go, to the mythology of the American Southwest. It's too early to say just how dearly this White House will pay, politically, for its associations with the now-defunct Houston energy trading company. But it was not too hard to discern the vulnerability Bush must feel in that scandal's wake nonetheless. Kenneth Lay's Enron is a state of mind that feels an awful lot like Texas-a place where legend has it that you can only judge a real man by the number of times he falls from grace, only to dust himself off and build himself another empire. And whatever the actual biographical provenance of our forty-third president-grandson of an Eastern Establishment senator from Connecticut, son of an Eastern Establishment president that made of his family a minor American political dynasty, and now a president who came to power with the blessings of that Eastern Establishment now that he was the scion of one of the great political dynasties of American history-has invented himself as the soul of Texas itself. And a politician who wears Texan pride on his sleeve cannot but tread carefully when Texan booms, as they so often do, go bust. It is not a Texas boom if you sedulously insure yourself against bust. For in the self-identity that Southwesterners have inculcated for themselves-not for nothing is the historical pattern of the American Southwest we are familiar with called a "mythology"-greatness must be built from "nothing." It is hard to imagine a Southwestern conservative sincerely struggling on behalf of an ideal so banal as "economic security." To be secure-hemmed in by the bureaucratic niceties that protect you from risk-has seemed nearly, to the greatest of these figures, to suffer a state of unmanning: you are thereby rendered liberal.   Of course these desert myths are built (as it were) on sand. Nothing comes from nothing. Some of the most famous Southwestern fortunes were originally made in the exploitation of government largesse; Barry Goldwater's family began its retailing empire in Arizona profiteering off government projects such as, first, the Indian Wars, and second, the building of the state's federally funded waterworks, without which no civilization could exist. That Southwestern protestations of manly independence take on such a characteristic of high camp is a direct function of their implausibility: a reaction formation. "Out here in the West," Barry Goldwater used to say, "we're not harassed by the fear of what might happen." Goldwaters "have always taken risks." Certainly more risks, at least, than the former proprietor of Arbusto. And for converts like Bush-who seems to have never dared looked back East between the time he left Yale and his White House ascendancy-the lionization of those who tempt busts by building booms is all the more zealous. As is the patronization of liberals-deep in the heart, as they say. It's getting a little to late to wonder about whether the guy is really a cowboy because he's a convert and realize all cowboys are converts. That's the West for you George W. Bush's Texas habit pops up in odd places and at strange times, like a stubborn rash. Last week, in a speech in Maine (roundabout the actual Bush family homestead in Kennebunkport, which, President Bush sheepishly allowed, was "I guess my second home"), George W. Bush brought up Crawford again. This time the message was more awkward-he was giving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy his due for helping him pass a bipartisan education bill (another of those Clintonian touches). "[T] he folks back home at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas will be amazed when they see me standing up there saying nice things about [Ted Kennedy]." The point seemed to be little more than to signal that where he comes from-his "home"-they still appreciate the value of a good Ted Kennedy joke. It's that old, base, Republican reactionary populism again. I speak impressionistically, of course. But  where is President Bush heading off to first, today, to sell his new proposals to the nation? He is heading straight into the welcoming arms of Dixie, Texas's country cousin in reactionary Republicanism. First stop is a "town-hall meeting," with handpicked questioners, in Winston-Salem, NC, then Daytona Beach and Atlanta. The symbolism is key. Bush is an old-style conservative Republican of the Southern and Southwestern; it is where his deepest sympathies lay; but which show up only fugitively in his most carefully scripted public orations. George W. Bush's Northeastern vacation seems soon to be over if it isn't already, and he's going back home, far from the place his Presidency was reborn, here; back to the place where he was reborn-south toward home, to Crawford.