In a two-page passage of his bestseller “Dead Certain,” Robert Draper rehashes then-Governor George W. Bush’s trip to the Palo Alto home of former Secretary of State George Shultz in April 1998.

“Inside were the Big-Thinkers of Stanford University’s ghetto for conservatives, the Hoover Institution: former Reagan economic advisers Martin and Annelise Anderson, economist John Cogan, the college’s impressive young provost and Sovietologist Condoleezza Rice, and the man who had organized the meeting, former Council of Economic Advisers director under the Bush administration Michael Boskin.”

The author reports that Bush spoke with Shultz’s Hispanic housekeeper in Spanish, “to her tittering delight.”

There had been a similar meeting of leading intellectual conservatives with Ronald Reagan in 1979.

“And now here was George W. Bush, about to provide a dose of deja vu,” Draper writes. “After listening to the others give their presentations — and, being professors, they all went overtime — Bush spoke his piece.”

Bush reportedly talked about Social Security reform, the International Monetary Fund and the future of India.

“When it was over, Shultz rather giddily took George W. Bush aside,” according to Draper. “He told Bush that back in 1979, after Reagan’s talk had concluded, Shultz had brought him to the very spot where they now stood, and said, Run. We will support you. And now, Shultz said, he wished to say the same thing to Bush.”