Mark Steyn: How Bush blew his chance

The president's speech to the United Nations was perfectly straightforward. His remarks at Ellis Island were also fine: I especially liked the way, in contrast to certain predecessors who shall remain nameless, his salute to the American spirit wasn't all about him. But the anniversary has passed, Year Two has begun, and those of who are partial to George W. Bush have nevertheless had to get used yet again to the old familiar pattern. Anyone who followed the guy during the 2000 campaign will recognize it.

He stacked up more money and a bigger poll lead than anyone had ever seen in a competitive race--and then he didn't bother campaigning in New Hampshire. So he lost the primary.

But he clawed his way back and won the nomination--and then he pretty much disappeared from sight to spend the summer working on his new ranch house back in Texas. So by Labor Day, Al Gore was ahead in the polls.

But he roused himself and eked out a small lead in the run-up to November--and then, in the wake of a damaging last-minute leak about an old DWI conviction, he flew back home and took the final weekend of the campaign off.

But he just about squeaked through on Election Day, even though his disinclination to rebut the drunk story almost certainly cost him the popular vote and a couple of close states.

This is the way George W. Bush does things, and his rendezvous with history on Sept. 11--the day that ''changed the world''--did not, in the end, change the Bush modus operandi. A few weeks after the attacks, he had the highest approval ratings of any president in history. But he didn't do anything with them. And, in political terms, he might as well have spent this summer playing golf and watching the director's cut of Austin Powers.

On Election Day in November, without Saddam's scalp on his bedpost, Bush will be right back where he was on Sept. 10, 2001: the 50 percent president, his approval ratings in the 50s, his ''negatives'' high, the half of the country that didn't vote for him feeling no warmer toward him than if the day that ''changed the world'' had never happened. The 90 percent poll numbers were always going to come down. It was just a question of where they stabilized, and what Bush would manage to accomplish while they were up in the stratosphere. By that measure, he squandered his opportunity.

The first casualty was his domestic agenda. Even as the USAF was strafing Tora Bora, Vermont's wily Sen. Pat Leahy continued to stall the president's judicial nominations; Ted Kennedy gutted the Bush education bill, and their fellow Democrats obstructed plans for oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At that moment, with his poll numbers in the 80s, it would have been so easy for Bush to do to Leahy what Clinton did to Gingrich.

The president could have said that, with so many suspected terrorists and their accomplices in custody, we can't afford vacancies and backlogs in our courthouses and my good frien' Pat needs to stop playin' politics with the federal judiciary. He could have said that wartime is no time for Congress to put preserving the integrity of Alaska's most pristine mosquito habitat over the energy needs of America. Sept. 11 is not just an event, hermetically sealed from everything before and after, but a context: Everything that's wrong with the eco-zealots, with the teachers' unions, with the big-government bureaucracies can be seen in their responses to that day. Bush should have struck in their hour of weakness; instead, he gave them all a pass: The time-servers and turf-protectors in the FBI, CIA and the other hotshot acronyms that failed America on 9/11 are all still in their jobs.

Perhaps the president's greatest mistake was his failure to take on the enervating Oprahfied therapeutic culture that, in the weeks after Sept. 11, looked momentarily vulnerable. There were two kinds of responses to that awful day. You could go with ''C'mon, guys, let's roll!'' the words of Todd Beamer as he and the brave passengers of Flight 93 took on their Islamist hijackers. Or you could go with ''healing'' and ''closure'' and the rest of the awful inert language of emotional narcissism. Had Bush taken it upon himself to talk up the virtues of courage and self-reliance demonstrated on Flight 93, he would have done a service not just to his nation but to his party, for a touchy-feely culture inevitably trends Democratic.

But he ducked the rhetorical challenge. And so, to mark the anniversary of Sept. 11, the teachers union encouraged us to stand around in a ''healing circle,'' so that America's children can master the consolations of victimhood rather than the righteous anger of the unjustly attacked. Same for the grown-ups: On TV, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung and the rest of the all-star sob sisters were out in force with full supporting saccharine piano accompaniment. The elites decided America's anger needed to be managed. It was a very Sept. 10 commemoration of Sept. 11. As the law professor Eugene Volokh put it to his own students, ''Wake up and smell the burning bodies.'' Despite the flags and the more robust country songs, Bush has allowed the culture to lapse back into its default mode of psychobabbling self-absorption.

In the end, even Bush's magnificent moral clarity faded away into a Colin Powellite blur. Long after it became clear that 3,000 Americans were killed by Saudi citizens with Saudi money direct from members of the Saudi royal family, Bush was still inviting Saudi princes to the Crawford ranch and insisting that the kingdom was a ''staunch friend'' in the war against terror. This is not just ridiculous but offensive. Even if it's merely ''rope-a-dope'' and behind the scenes all kinds of plans are being made, the public evasions diminish the president's authority. Symbolism matters. The White House is for business, the privilege of kicking loose at the ranch ought to be reserved for real friends. Yet Australia's John Howard, whose boys fought alongside the United States in Afghanistan, didn't get an invite to Crawford, and the fellows who bankrolled al-Qaida did.

In January, naming Iraq as part of the ''axis of evil,'' Bush declared that ''time is running out." Eight months later, time had run back in again. ''I'm a patient man,'' the president says every couple of days now. By May, the American people were back to ticking ''education'' as the most pressing issue facing the nation. Four months ago, I wrote that if war with Iraq isn't under way by the first anniversary of Sept. 11, George W. Bush might as well nickname himself President Juan Term. Since then, the evaporation of the Bush presidency has only accelerated. George W. Bush's modesty is endearing. But even a modest man needs to use the bully pulpit once in a while.

The difference: The House of Saud and the Bush family have been doing business, resulting in enormous finacial benefit to both, for a very long time now. Howard is merely a politician.

You didn't huh? Look I may need a beer but you are a 6pack beyond coherence.

Perhaps we never will see eye-to-eye. If you take the defeatist position that media bias is an obstacle that can never be surmounted, even by a sitting president, you will never see your way clear to victory. I only hope the administration is not similarly limited in its thinking, especially on issues such as the Homeland Security bill, which are so crucial to our nation's safety.

PS — You may see a Bush veto of the Homeland Security bill as a victory, but it's a pyrrhic one at best if he ultimately doesn't get what he wants. If the Democrats are allowed to set the terms of the debate, for whatever reason, they will always have the upper hand.

This analysis is almost Dowdish in its shallowness. The enterprise that Bush is undertaking is a bit beyond the scope of understanding of quite a few in our soundbite media. Constructing a tortured metaphor of the 2000 election makes it appear Steyn was desperate to fill his 1000-word allotment. Lots of words + little meaning = peanut gallery.

I feel like I'm conversing with a 6 year old, so I'll try to make this as simple as possible for you:

I said Bush family has had business dealings with the Saudis for a long time, and I stand by that statement.

I DIDN'T say that their fortune was made by these dealings. (I'm quite aware that it was made in West Texas, as you mentioned).

If you can't understand this simple distinction, you're beyond help.

I'm a defeatist? LOL

You choose to ignore political reality. You choose to ignore what a veto means. A veto means lots and lots of press coverage. A veto is the Constitutional method for bringing an issue to the public eye. Bush will win and he may win without a veto ever being needed.

I feel like I'm conversing with a 6 year old, so I'll try to make this as simple as possible for you:

Look friend you have made statements of fact assertions that there is a Bush-Saudi business relationship. A 6 year old would take that at face value… an adult requires documentation. So put up or shut up.

Your first point would be valid if the plan was not try terrorists, except for US citizens, before military tribunals and I doubt that any realistic estimate of citizen terrorists would be high enough to be used as a justification for more Judges. I agree on the domestic oil issue though.

Yeah, you make sense.

"In the end, even Bush's magnificent moral clarity faded away into a Colin Powellite blur. Long after it became clear that 3,000 Americans were killed by Saudi citizens with Saudi money direct from members of the Saudi royal family, Bush was still inviting Saudi princes to the Crawford ranch and insisting that the kingdom was a ''staunch friend'' in the war against terror. This is not just ridiculous but offensive."

What exactly do you disagree with?

After observing the spectacle of 9-11's first anniversary

What spectacle? I thought his visiting with family members at ground zero for over an hour, not rushing each one, but really listening to them, did more for his image & his sincerety than any long winded speech could have done. He is a president of the common people, he doesn't use a tragedy to advance himself!! Is that SO wrong???

I hate to say it, but Steyn has two good points here:

(1): Bush erred in refusing to use his political capital to further domestic conservative issues. He caved in on the oil drilling, unionizing the airport workers, and education.

(2): Not attacking the self-loathing left mercilessly. Some discussions one shouldn't stay above...

Having said these things, I am afraid I think the Republicans in Congress are guilty of both of them as well. I don't know that Bush has some particular flaw. Republicans chronically refuse to get serious about attacking the Democrats. They persist in the delusion that if they're nice to the Democrats, if they help them up off of the floor instead of finishing them off, the Democrats will stop trying to cut their throats at every opportunity.

Let' see. Either Steyn knows best or Bush knows best. I vote for Bush once again. Monday morning quarterbacks that don't have access to a fraction of the information or resources that the Pres. does don't cut it for me. Either Bush is the luckiest person I have ever seen or he knows what he is doing. If Steyn is so smart, he should run against Bush and make his case.

I should have specified — the media spectacle. It was a nonstop pity party on TV. However, the public remembrances in my area were also excessively focused on grief and "understanding" rather than justifiable anger for this outrage. That's what Steyn was talking about, and what I was agreeing with. The culture at large is still too obsessed with feeling and healing in the wake of 9-11, and the nation may pay the price of another attack as a result. If we "put it behind us" and go back to sleep, America will still be vulnerable. Self-pity and navel-gazing (as a nation) are exactly the wrong reaction, and a surefire way to lose the War on Terror.

With regards to the "staunch friend" comment, I think Bush has a tendency to go overboard with personal compliments when a foreign head of state does what he wants. The Arabs got pretty steamed when Bush said that Ariel Sharon was a "man of peace" after Sharon agreed to pull back from some area that the Israelis had occupied earlier. These compliments are not broad statements of character but an acknowledgement of cooperation on a specific point.

[Dead silence.]

What exactly do you disagree with?

The House of Saud is currently rushing to the front of the line to house American troops when Iraq's time comes to pass. If you and Mark Steyn were in charge I suppose that would not be possible.

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