Bush's Point Man On The Economy

Even though Lawrence B. Lindsey worked for George Bush for years, the President's son, George W., didn't get to know the economist until last summer. That's when Lindsey was invited to the Texas governor's mansion in Austin to audition for the job of top economic adviser to a then-hypothetical Bush Presidential campaign. The meeting had been arranged by Indianapolis businessman Al Hubbard, a classmate of Bush at Harvard Business School who got to know Lindsey while working on Vice-President Dan Quayle's White House staff. "They hit it off right away," says Hubbard.

Indeed, Bush soon concluded that he had found the man who could draft an economic plan appealing to both Republican primary voters and the general public should he run for President in 2000. After all, the former Reagan White House economist had solid conservative credentials: His 1990 book The Growth Experiment was a staunch defense of the Reagan supply-side tax cuts.