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The right look It's Face Time for BushBy Rick Horowitz When Georgie Dub gets serious, it's quite the sight to see. You get the furrowed brow. You get the solid jaw. You get the somber voice. No grins this time for our Georgie. Not a smile -- and certainly not a smirk. No joking around; this is serious business. We're talking electability here. OK, so we're also talking about putting a man to death. But mostly we're talking about electability. If Georgie Dub wants to be elected president of these United States, the experts say, he needs to show some gravitas. Some what? Some gravitas -- it's the Word of the Week among the professors and the pundits. Some (thank you, Mr. Webster) "reserved dignity; propriety and good taste in behavior and speech, as of a leader or official." Sound like any lock-solid Republican presidential nominee we know? No. And that's the problem. Everyone says Georgie Dub is a charmer. Everyone says he's got the right bloodlines for the job, not to mention a humongous pile of cash and an armada of advisers who can tell him where all the different countries are, should he ever find himself even vaguely curious about such things. But everyone also says he's a little light in the heaviness department. Fundamentally frothy. Bereft of heft. This is not a good thing for a White House wannabe; voters tend to like their presidents with a certain substance to them. (Not necessarily Albertine extremes of the stuff, but a certain substance nonetheless.) This death penalty business, though -- and this Gary Graham case in particular -- here was a chance for the candidate to turn things around. It needn't be just a problem for him, this Gary Graham case, the experts said; it can be an opportunity. And the question wasn't "What will Georgie Dub decide?" The question was "How will he look while he's doing it?" You're allowed to be surprised. After all, you probably figure that any man who'd already presided over 130-odd Texecutions would come across as perfectly serious, no matter what he did about Possible No. 130-Odd-Plus-One. You'd also figure that any man who'd let that many needles go into that many arms would have worked out his (this-is-not-a-) game face years ago. But then you'd remember those unfortunate moments when Georgie Dub seemed to some ears to be poking fun at Karla Faye Tucker's pleas for mercy before she was put to sleep, when Georgie Dub seemed to some eyes to be snickering at the thought of defense lawyers snoozing in the courtroom instead of standing up for their clients. Stir those unfortunate moments together with this latest flurry of reports about mishandled death-penalty cases in Texas and Illinois, about the possibility of convictions improperly obtained, of innocent people wrongly convicted... Suddenly our Georgie looks not so much serious as callous, not to mention frivolous. Voters don't like their presidents frivolous -- not about the important things, anyway. (Underwear maybe, but not undertakers.) And with a whole list of condemned prisoners scheduled to meet their fate in the Lone Star State between now and Election Day -- Cue the makeover! Georgie goes grim! Can't you hear the gurus whispering? "A little more head tilt." "And turn the mouth down." "And maybe just a hint of introspection?" "Stick him if you want to, governor -- but can you give us a little 'agonized' first?" Georgie Dub knows how to follow instructions; what's the point of all those handlers if you don't let them handle you? So there he was at the microphone: a suddenly solemn, thoroughly thoughtful public official fielding life-and-death questions and spelling out his concerns in measured tones. Not a trace of the Old Georgie anywhere. And how long will the New Georgie stick around? Not a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Georgie Dub is a fun-loving guy. But gravitas -- gravitas can be such a pain. Posted 6/22/00. Fresh
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Rick Horowitz