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“Attacking” President Bush

November 27, 2003
“Some are attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,” says a new Republican TV ad for President Bush.

In its verbal sloppiness, this message is fully worthy of the president himself. Of course nobody is “attacking” him in the same sense that he is “attacking the terrorists,” with real bullets and bombs. Various people are criticizing him, some with measured language, some with verbal abuse, but all of them are well within the limits of the “freedom” and “democracy” he says he wants to promote around the world.

So why does he allow and encourage his subordinates to imply that his political opponents are on the side of the terrorists?

Nobody knows what Bush means by freedom and democracy, which he seems to equate with each other. In his mouth these terms sound like mere slogans, with no precise significance. He uses them the way Madison Avenue uses advertising jingles, to excite stock responses.

It must be said that his speeches sometimes contain thoughtful reflections, but these are hardly typical of him. It’s as if his speechwriters are doing their conscientious best to supply philosophical justifications for his policies, almost in spite of him. Like most politicians, the man himself is most comfortable with cliché.

Time magazine notes that Americans tend to feel strongly about George W. Bush. There are “those who regard Bush as the very ideal of American presidential leadership and those who regard him as an embarrassing and dangerous usurper.”

Both reactions show a lack of proportion. Bush isn’t a monster, just a mediocrity. If he didn’t just happen to be the most powerful man on earth, nobody would bother deflating him. But his elevation to the presidency has elicited the most preposterous flattery. One columnist hails him as “a statesman of vision and remarkable courage ... a born-again idealist ... a strategic pioneer ... our most decisive president since Harry Truman,” et cetera.

Funny that nobody noticed all these rare qualities when Bush was stumbling and fumbling his way through the 2000 primaries. He didn’t even outshine his humdrum Republican opponents; in fact it was John McCain who impressed people then (don’t ask me why).

But power has its magic. As King Lear says, “Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? And the creature run from the cur? There thou might’st behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.” Hamlet likewise remarks, “My uncle is king of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little.”

Henry Kissinger put it wittily: “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” And the president of the United States is ex officio the world’s greatest celebrity, even if he’s Jerry Ford.

Jerry Ford! We’d nearly forgotten him! And he’s still alive, even though he was literally attacked twice, both times by women! One of the would-be assassins was Squeaky Fromme, former member of the Charles Manson gang, but I can’t recall the other one’s name.

Jerry Ford! Now there was a real live wire! Nobody ever pretended that he was anything but a dull man. The only time he ever created the least excitement was when he beaned someone with a golf ball. You marveled that anyone would feel strongly enough about him, one way or the other, to shoot at him.

Ford was Bush’s mental peer, but since he didn’t have an army of neoconservative pundits likening him to Newton and Spinoza, it was never necessary to cut him down to size. If you’d put a whoopee cushion on his chair, you’d probably have to explain the joke to him.

Ford was, and is, an unanswerable refutation of the notion that only an extraordinary man, for good or evil, can achieve the presidency; either a man of heroically worthy qualities or a villain “by merit rais’d to that bad eminence.”

Maybe we should resign ourselves to the unflattering truth: our political system isn’t hospitable to men of stature. If a Thomas Jefferson should seek public office today, he wouldn’t get far. Our system would weed him out early.