Bush: birdbrain or ideal leader in times of war?

Bush: birdbrain or ideal leader in times of war? By Mark Steyn (Filed: 11/09/2002)

Anyone who followed George W Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign will recognise the pattern.

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 to spend the summer working on his new ranch house in Texas. So by Labour 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 drink-driving conviction, he flew back home and took off the final weekend of the campaign.

But he just about squeaked through on election day, even though his disinclination to rebut the drink 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 September 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.

On election day in November, without Saddam's scalp on his bedpost, Mr Bush will be right back where he was on September 10, 2001: the 50 per cent president, his approval ratings in the fifties, 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.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Last autumn, Bush aides were at pains to emphasise that the son would not make his father's mistake: the new president understood that political capital can't be banked. You have to spend it when you have it because it won't be there in six months.

The 90 per cent poll numbers were always going to come down. It was just a question of where they stabilised and what Mr Bush would manage to accomplish while they were in the stratosphere.

By that measure, he squandered his opportunity. After September 11, the trickiest job for the American media was trying to explain why the supposed bonehead was doing such a good job running the war.

The most artful explanation came from Jacob Weisberg in the online magazine Slate, an early adherent of the what-a-birdbrain school of Bush scholarship. Reluctant to abandon his central thesis, he decided that the president was still a moron but that war plays to a moron's strengths: "Nuance, complexity, subtlety and contradiction are not part of the mental universe he inhabits.

And curiously enough, it is these very qualities of mind - or lack thereof - that seem to be making him such a good war president," wrote Weisberg. In war the simpleton comes into his own.

He had a point. With Bill Clinton, everything was nuanced, complex, subtle and contradictory.

In his only major speech on the war, Clinton argued that it all went back to Christian excesses in the First Crusade and that there were many different kinds of terrorism, though the only ones he mentioned were Christians killing Muslims, southern plantation owners killing slaves, white settlers killing Native Americans, General Sherman burning farms in the Civil War. "Even today," he concluded, "we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation."

Clinton's successor may be a dummy but he understands that the events of September 11 are nothing to do with Sherman's march through Georgia or a couple of rednecks jeering "Get lost, faggot!" in a roadhouse parking lot. September 11 called for moral clarity and Mr Bush provided it in a way his predecessor never could.

Unfortunately, in devoting his energies to the war, the president let his domestic agenda die. Even as the USAF was strafing Tora Bora, Senator Pat Leahy, a wily Democrat, 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 eighties, it would have been so easy for Mr Bush to do to Leahy what Clinton did to Newt 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.

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.

September 11 is not just an event, hermetically sealed from everything before and after, but a context: everything that's wrong with the environmental movement, with the teachers' unions, with the big-government bureaucracies can be seen in their responses to that day.

Perhaps the president's greatest mistake was his failure to take on the therapeutic culture that, in the weeks after September 11, looked 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 and, at the cost of their own lives, prevented a fourth plane from slamming through the White House. Or you could go with "healing" and "closure" and the rest of the awful, inert language of emotional narcissism.

Had Mr Bush talked up the virtues of courage and self-reliance demonstrated on Flight 93 he would have done a service to his nation.

But he ducked the rhetorical challenge. And so, to mark the anniversary of September 11, the teachers' union is recommending that pupils 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.

Despite the flags and the bestselling kick-ass country songs, Mr Bush has allowed the culture to lapse back into its self-absorption.

Increasingly dispirited as the summer wore on, Republican foot-soldiers pondered a basic question: when your leader puts his domestic agenda on hold to switch to a war presidency and then puts the war presidency on hold, what's left?

In the end, even Mr Bush's magnificent moral clarity faded away into a Colin Powellite blur. Long after a lawsuit by victims' families alleged that 3,000 Americans were killed by Saudi citizens with Saudi money direct from some members of the Saudi royal family, Mr Bush was still inviting Saudi princes to the Crawford ranch and insisting that the kingdom was a "staunch friend" in the war against terrorism.

This is not just ridiculous but offensive. 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 US in Afghanistan, didn't get an invite to Crawford.

Words matter too. Mr Bush's remarks about the Saudis come perilously close to lying to the American people about who murdered their friends and family.

In January, naming Iraq as part of the "axis of evil", Mr Bush declared that "time is running out". Eight months later, time had run back in again. "I'm a patient man," said the president. "It feels like August," wrote Rich Lowry of National Review back in May.

August 2001, he meant. The "sleeping giant" had resumed his slumbers. The American people are back to ticking "education" as the most pressing issue facing the nation. Four months ago, I wrote that if war with Iraq isn't underway by the first anniversary of September 11, George W Bush, so fond of goofy nicknames, might as well nickname himself President Juan Term.

Since then, the evaporation of the Bush presidency has accelerated. The question now is whether, even with war, he can retrieve the purpose of his administration.

I don't think they are slumbers, Nick. There was a very deliberate run-up to the war with Iraq. All summer and fall troops were constantly being deployed, but unless you paid attention to the stories from individual home town papers you didn't realize it was happening. The diplomatic pressure slowly escalated concurrently. It isn't like we did nothing all summer and fall and then suddenly at the 11th hour decided to go to war. The media, however, does leave that impression.

Regarding the campaign, Mr. Steyn is wrong. Bush campaigned all summer and fall. The media instituted a news black-out after it became obvious that Gore wasn't going to have a huge resergence.

I am positive about this, because A Citizen Reporter and I documented (along with reports from a lot of freepers) the campaign stops and appearances, with dozens of first-hand reports. Some of those reports are bookmarked on my page under the "Bush/Cheney 2000 Victory Tour" titles. The photos are now mostly gone, but the reports are still there.

I think that one can fault President Bush for not making an effort in New Hampshire, but other than that I think he ran a pretty decent campaign.

As far as Congressional action, President Bush does a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiation. I distinctly remember that approaching his first August vacation in 2001, there was a lot of media hype that nothing was happening. Then the last week before he left for Crawford, a flurry of bills were passed and signed.

Steyn is wrong. Bush campaigned all summer and fall. The media instituted a news black-out after it became obvious that Gore wasn't going to have a huge resergence.

Hmmm. That's different. I don't watch TV news anymore, so I did not know that. I just assumed that they were doing the same thing they did in 1992, when Clinton ran against Bush 41.

There they would show a video clip of Clinton speaking to a cheering crowd, getting in his best sound bite of the day. Then they would switch to a still photo of a scowling George H.W. Bush, and the announcer would say, "Bush spoke to supporters in Iowa today, where he mispronounced the name of Congressman Uczciwy."

...capable of greatness, but he does lapse into these months-long slumbers that allow the press to heap unanswered dung on his programs...

So far he's always managed to push them back and score a goal himself...

Slumbers? I'm more inclined to see apparent periods of inactivity as Sisyphean struggles against institutional inertia, where (to mix a metaphor) a lot of paddling is going on beneath the surface.

Is the press heaping dung? Of course. But George's understated style, a huge contrast to the repulsively narcissistic, permanent campaign of the Clinton WH, has proven pretty effective in "scoring goals" despite the s*** splatter. Let's just hope he can score a few more before Nov '04, perhaps winning over a whole bunch of new fans along the way.

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