George W. Bush ’75: The Last Four Weeks
As his chartered 737, “The Plane Talk Express,” descended towards Boston’s Logan Airport George W. Bush peered out the small window. In only few hours, he would be debating his Democratic opponent Al Gore in front of a nationwide audience.
But, for the moment, his eyes were fixed upon Fenway Park, one of his favorite baseball stadiums. He had copied its old-time, hand-operated scoreboard for his Texas Rangers’ Ballpark at Arlington. During his five-year tenure as owner, he happily recalled, the Rangers had done quite well against the Red Sox. A record of 39 wins and 27 losses. “Who says I’m not a detail guy?” he chuckled quietly to himself.
The Governor of Texas cast his gaze further down the southern bank of the Charles River to the distinctive neo-Georgian buildings of Harvard Business School where he had graduated 25 years ago. Bush had missed his 25th Reunion, which had taken place the weekend before. But his classmates understood; you didn’t need to be a Harvard MBA to know there were more practical states for Bush to be than the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.
He had noticed one of the Reunion Weekend seminars -- “Job Search in the New Millennium: How to Market Yourself in Today’s Fast Moving Economy.” Bush was confident of victory, but, he had joked with his wife, Laura, it would always be helpful to have a backup plan.
The next 31 days would determine whether he Bush could have benefited from attending that seminar.
After a difficult month of August, during which his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, had erased his double-digit lead and gone ahead, Bush – with appearances on Oprah and Regis Live -- seemed to have brought the race back to a dead heat. “Maybe,” Bush had suggested to his chief strategist Karl Rove, “I should stop flying around the country and see if Regis would just let me be his co-host for the rest of the campaign?”
The questions he would be face in tonight’s television appearance would be a little more hard-hitting. But few things prepared one better for verbal battle than having to defend your position every day in class against 79 other first-year Harvard MBA’s.
This was a critical moment in the campaign and Bush had to decide the strategy that would get him to the magic 270 electoral votes. It was, he thought, very much like the situations faced by managers in the hundreds of case studies he had analyzed at Harvard. He was taught there to first review the ‘case facts’ and assess the entire situation before deciding what actions to take.
After running one of the government’s biggest divisions, the state of Texas, George W. Bush believed he was ready for a promotion. By doing so, he could also restore the luster of one of the nation’s most prominent political brands. In fact, the race would be a battle between two of the leading family-run businesses in the industry.
Bush had been a blue-chip political name for much of the twentieth century and became America’s #1 brand in the late 1980’s. Its popularity, however, fell precipitously in 1991 due to a public perception that President Bush – though successful in international ventures – had neglected the domestic market. The next generation, George W. Bush and his brother, Jeb, put the family firm into turnaround, left the Washington market completely and set up franchises in Texas and Florida. After fighting off a hostile takeover of the party by John McCain, Bush won the Republican nomination and began reengineering the party.
The Gores had much more entrepreneurial, small cap roots in Tennessee. The scion, Al Gore, Jr., followed closely in the footsteps of the company founder into the Senate when he was tapped to be the nation’s #2 and heir apparent. Unlike Bush, he had no significant managerial experience, but for eight years did serve as the government’s top internal management consultant.
As the campaign began, market conditions appeared to favor Gore. Most customers seemed generally satisfied with the product, though they had some questions about the management’s personal conduct. In order to release his own value while maintaining some link to the parent company, Gore attempted a complex spin-off during the Democratic Convention. Investors were generally bullish on the issuance of the Gore tracking stock.
Gore also handled the tricky issue of succession more adeptly from a political standpoint. Bush seemed to have chosen the more qualified Dick Cheney, a COO who nicely complemented Bush’s big picture, highly-delegative managerial style. But Gore’s choice, Joe Lieberman, turned out to be a marketing coup, which immediately added several percentage points of market value to the Democratic ticket.
Tonight’s debate at the University of Massachusetts would offer the biggest distribution channel the two campaigns would have. It would be a direct taste test since organizers had refused to give smaller brands – notably Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan -- any shelf space. Bush didn’t think he had to hit a home run over the Green Monster tonight, but he couldn’t afford to make a lot of errors. He just needed to show that he was – to paraphrase his running mate – “big league”.
To Bush, running for the Presidency was a Leadership case study. But he believed that his major challenge in the next four weeks would be taught in Marketing class. He felt he was offering the better product; it was just a matter of doing a better job communicating to the buying public. The more a customer knew about him and his policies, the more likely he would close the sale. If I only had a chance to meet every voter individually, he firmly believed, I could win them over.
This evening might be the closest he would come to such a wholesale opportunity. To Bush, the fact that the public had not embraced his big tax rebate is that that he hasn’t sold it well enough. But he did have to consider that there might be a Manufacturing issue; that the product he was offering might be viewed by the consumer as a retro 1980’s loss leader.
Bush believed his competition changed its packaging too often and made product claims that were not true. But making that point imperiled his most significant competitive advantage – likeability. He had to better explain what his Marketing prof might have called his Value Proposition. Give consumers – generally satisfied with their existing brands – are reason to switch? In his favor was that an increasing number of political consumers had become less brand loyal. Almost half of them would not end up even going to the store to make a purchase.
And, can you add enough new incremental customers in the general election with the same product you sold to your regular clientele in the primaries? In particular, he knew that it was key that he did better among women.
Bush also realized that the case – and the election – may also be partially Organizational Behavior. OB is the class that students routinely dismiss as touchy-feely superfluity, but as alumni often view as the most important workplace skill. He realized that key female demographic may end up going for the guy who’s better at OB. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by bad numbers in August. Heck, Al was kissing Tipper and I was calling Adam Clymer an “Ass----“.
Bush had received one intriguing suggestion out of left field. It was an e-mail sent him by an old B-School sectionmate, Bob Gebhard, who had attended the 25th Reunion. “I know you have no shortage of advice,” wrote Gebhard, who runs a metal finishing company in Providence, Rhode Island, “but I was really struck how many of our classmates said their wives or daughters would have trouble voting for you, based largely on the issue of abortion.”
Gebhard suggested that Bush explicitly send a message to these independent women in the debate that he would govern more moderately on social issues. “I know my little ad hoc focus group might have been torn to shreds in Section C and may be worth what you paid for it.”
Yet, ultimately, Bush had learned at Harvard often the final result – despite the best management advice, talent or training – often turns on externalities beyond one’s control. Bush would never acknowledge this publicly, but falling stock prices and rising oil prices would probably help him more than anything he himself could do.
He was mulling over the situation as the plane banked for its final approach over Boston Harbor. “The water still looks a little dirty,” he remarked to an aide who had been with the Bushes for years. It was in the water a few thousand feet below where his father had famously campaigned, the last time a sitting Vice President came back from a double-digit deficit to beat a popular governor. That was one case study he intended to give a different ending.
In fact, it was his dad had given him the only piece of advice he was sure to take. “Just don’t check your watch until the debate is over.”
John Solomon ’91 prepared this case as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.
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