Bush the intellectual

Linda Chavez:

KARL Rove's recent revelation of President Bush's passion for books wasn't a surprise to me. In a Wall Street Journal column last week, Rove explained that for the last three years, he and the president have had a friendly rivalry to see who could finish more books during the year. Rove won each year - but Bush was no piker. In the three years of the competition, the president read 186 books to Rove's 250.

Much of the intelligentsia no doubt will be shocked to learn Bush is an avid reader of serious books, but it simply confirms something I already suspected. During the first real discussion I ever had with then-Gov. Bush in 1998, he brought up a book written by a former colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute.

Myron Magnet's "The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass" isn't the sort of book you come across if your taste goes to light reading. A scathing dissection of good intentions gone awry, Magnet's book lays bare the folly of liberal interventions on behalf of the poor and the devastating role of the counterculture in creating the underclass. But it's no red-meat screed of the sort that has propelled many well-known pundits to the top of the best-seller list either. Magnet is not a polemicist, but a serious scholar and elegant writer. Bush's reference to the book spoke worlds to me.

Liberals have always believed they have a monopoly on intelligence. Of all the Republican presidents in my lifetime, I can only recall one who was given high marks for raw intellect: Richard M. Nixon. In liberals' telling, Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford were middle-brow Midwesterners who preferred the golf links to books; Ronald Reagan was a B-film actor capable of giving a good speech that someone else wrote; and the two Bushes were Yale graduates by way of money and pedigree, not merit.

Of course we now know - thanks to the publication of "Reagan, In His Own Hand," a reproduction of Reagan's early handwritten speeches - that Reagan was often his own best wordsmith and that his ideas were original, not borrowed.

Contrary to the stereotype that all conservatives are narrow-minded dummies, I've found that conservatives are far more likely to be familiar with liberal intellectual thought than liberals are with the views of conservative intellectuals.

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I read books that interest me. I don't think I read as many books as President Bush, but I do read quite a few every year. His reading does contradict the arrogant attitude of liberals toward him in particular and conservatives in general. Liberals have this arrogant belief that if you were really smart you would be a liberal. That hampers them in understanding conservatives and the world in general.