EVEN BEFORE GEORGE WALKER BUSH was sworn in as the forty-third president of the United States, his administration promised a sea change from the noisy, messy, melodrama of William Jefferson Clinton, a gifted but flawed steward whose presidency seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis.In a sense, Bush had only to be someone other than Clinton. Woody Allen says that 98 per cent of life is simply showing up, and that's all the incurious, untutored Bush had to do. Americans wanted a respite from the wasting cycle of allegation and recrimination - a return to normalcy, so to speak - and that is what Bush and his buttoned-down Rotarians offered. If he threatens to be the dullest president since Calvin Coolidge, he can live with it.So, at noon on that rain-lashed day in January, Bush pledged his loyalty to country and constitution. He delivered a respectable inaugural address, appointed a respectable cabinet, and unveiled a respectable programme. Already, they said, he was exceeding expectations.Bush could be thankful that he wasn't his father succeeding Ronald Reagan, or Harry Truman succeeding Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, by the grace of history, George Bush would succeed Bill Clinton, bringing an end, as Republicans say it, to the reign of a self-indulgent baby boomer, his opportunist wife, and that legion of jumped up, denimclad Ivy Leaguers who regarded the president as they would a prefect.In that contest, it wasn't hard for Bush to look good. If he wanted to return dignity to the office, he had only to refuse to reveal his preference for boxers or briefs. If he wanted to restore morality, he had only to remain faithful to his wife or refuse the entreaties of his relatives for favours, and, if he didn't, he could rest assured that there would be no more special prosecutors (the law has lapsed) to pursue him. If he wanted to foster bi-partisanship, he had only to try to seduce liberal Democrats and silence conservative Republicans. Clinton, for his part, didn't much care about dignity, propriety, or bi-partisanship.In other words, merely being 'the unClinton' would buy Bush an extended honeymoon. With exquisite timing, Clinton accentuated the contrast between old and new by cutting an eleventh-hour deal on immunity from prosecution, dispensing pardons to a notorious tax evader, among others, and carrying off thousands of dollars worth of gifts. Could there have been a more unseemly departure for Clinton and a more fortuitous one for his successor?'Bush's transition largely a success, all sides suggest,' gushed the New York Times, comparing the transition, naturally, to Clinton's disastrous one in 1993. After hearing Bush's inaugural address, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative commentator, squealed: 'That's a speech he could not have given six months ago!' as if the famously unlettered Bush had mastered remedial rhetoric.Yet the honeyed tone of Bush's first weeks in office - the new God-fearing legions in the White House, the promise of a new moral climate, the call for duty and citizenship, the courting of Democrats - had its uses, the greatest of which was to shade the emerging fundamental conservatism of the new administration.What was striking was how audaciously the president pushed his agenda, and how quickly the warmth of reconciliation congealed in the cold press of power. Who could have guessed that he took office amid the most disputed election in the country's history? Or that he lost the popular vote by 537,000 votes? Or that he was resoundingly rejected by women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Jews?If Bush was inhibited by his margin of victory, however, he didn't let on. All that Yuletide talk of grand conciliatory gestures faded like a soft summer mist. His cabinet, for example, comprises wealthy, white Anglo-Saxon plutocrats, some representatives of minorities, a token Democrat, and not a single Jew. The candidate who declared that he was 'a uniter, not a divider' picked a secretary of labor who didn't care for organized labour (she was forced to withdraw her candidacy) and a secretary of the interior who didn't care for environmentalists. …