Posted on 02/03/2002 10:03:34 AM PST by NYCVirago
Both President Bush and Mayor Bloomberg are doing an unusual thing: treating people like adults rather than fools.
As Bush spoke to the nation the other night, I was thinking of the last time I happened to actually see a President deliver a State of the Union address in person.
It was January 1968. Both my friend Ernie Washington and his best pal, Sonny Davis, were young and alive.
The speaker was Lyndon Johnson, and on that long-gone evening he looked right out at everyone assembled with those huge, feel-sorry-for-me, cocker spaniel brown eyes of his and lied. "The enemy has been defeated in battle after battle," Johnson told Congress.
But the war in Vietnam was a mess.
The weekly casualty lists were growing longer and longer. Too many parents were burying sons 18 and 19 for lousy reasons nobody could or wanted to explain.
Ernie and Sonny were with the 9th Marines, two young black guys who'd grown up together, gone to school together, shipped out together. Then, suddenly, Sonny was dead, the only child of Bubba and Lena Davis.
He wasn't even old enough to vote.
Ernie didn't hear the news about his friend for a few weeks. He was devastated.
A couple months later, Ernie's 13-month tour ended. He was going home, but Sonny wasn't going with him.
When he got back, proudly wearing his uniform, Purple Heart on his chest, a white cab driver refused to take him from the airport to his mother's apartment. American cities were in flames. Troops had been called out. It was the day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
I thought this as I watched Bush, then listened as commentators tried to explain his popularity.
They seemed to gloss over what might be the most obvious reason: The man is not a liar.
Maybe it's a sign of senility or premature optimism on my part, but Bush is the most likable fellow to sit in the Oval Office in my adult lifetime. Jack Kennedy was charming, but there was a distance about him. Ronald Reagan had magic but always seemed on the verge of losing his place in the story. LBJ was a paranoid control freak. Richard Nixon was a criminal. Gerald Ford was an amiable dope, Jimmy Carter a well-intentioned misfit, Bush 41 was a terrific man who took his eye off the economic ball and was beaten by a brilliant, glib serial adulterer who lacked character.
So W has been the perfect antidote to eight years of self-absorption, elitism, focus groups, polls, consultants, a constant campaign and both Clintons' absolute refusal to accept individual responsibility for staining the presidency.
Bush at this moment is history's refreshing gift to America.
He isn't kidding anyone, most of all not himself, as he charts a course for a country at war.
Bloomberg is kind of a Jewish version of Bush.
Delivering his first State of the City address, he came across as an underestimated, confident guy who uses simple, straightforward declarative sentences to describe problems that most politicians lie about or try to avoid with the poetry of pretty language.
"The Board of Education is intrinsically incapable of meeting the educational needs of our children," the mayor declared. "It must go."
He said this without screaming, yelling, beating his chest or taunting and bullying anyone in the audience.
Like Bush, Bloomberg clearly means what he says.
The President is talking us through the new normalcy of war. The latest news of the daily combat against terrorism has become part of our lives. It's something that can't be made lighter by a lie. It comes with huge costs, to people as well as budgets.
New York — like other areas — is paying a big price. Business is off. Layoffs are constant. Economic security — personal and corporate — is as hard to grasp as fog.
Getting the city back on firm footing is going to take time, work and sacrifice. And Bloomberg says so.
Winning this war will mean lives, years, patience and the insistence that leaders tell us the truth as we travel a hard road.
It might not be pretty, but it's better than having to bury an only boy, killed by the artillery of political ambition.
Just ask Sonny Davis' parents.
E-mail: mikebarniclenews@aol.com
"The Board of Education is intrinsically incapable of meeting the educational needs of our children," the mayor declared. "It must go."
Bush 41 was a terrific man who took his eye off the economic ball
Bush 41 took his eye off the enemy, namely congressional Democrats, and they sabotaged him.
Barnicle has written a pretty interesting column above. He makes the comparison between Bloomberg and Bush, and they do share some similar characteristics.
I don't know if he has much input on Bloomberg business news broadcasting, but their general news coverage is slanted more to the left than all the others. That includes CBS, ABC, CNN and PBS. I can't stand it!
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