first three policy advisers: Rice for foreign policy, former Federal Reserve Board member Lawrence Lindsey for economics and Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith for domestic issues. By this spring, the three department chairs had organized a network of scores of experts who are on call to attend briefings and submit papers to the Bush operation in Austin. Besides briefing the governor, GWU has had another purpose: to convince "the policy community" in the nation's leading universities and think tanks that Bush was more than a handsome face with a famous name. The governor, accordingly, hasn't cut class. Goldsmith put together 18 task forces on issues from health-care spending to education. Since February a stream of what Goldsmith calls "smart conservatives" about 200 of them have weighed in with papers and advice. More than 50 of them have trekked down to Austin. "No politician should have to go though what we've put him through," jokes Goldsmith. But the student body is an obstreperous one. "It's unfair to view these sessions as people tutoring the governor," says Goldsmith. "He dominates the conversations. He interrogates the academics." Bush isn't interested in ideas for their own sake. "He's looking for outcomes," says adviser Bob Woodson. He doesn't want to know more than he needs to know and he doesn't want to know it until he has to. He was unfamiliar, for example, with Israel's sale of military technology to China, even though the details were spelled out last week on the front page of The New York Times. Bush focuses when it's time to give a major speech. Then a smaller circle of the GWU faculty gathers to help hone the message, and prepare him to defend it in detail. "At that point," says Bolten, "he focuses on specifics in a very systematic way. He wants to be able to answer any reasonable question out there." The foreign-policy speech has long been in the works. It's based, Rice says, on Bush's mainstream Republican belie...
