President Bush is not an idiot. President Bush is a smart man, surrounded by brilliant advisers. He has a BA from Yale and an MBA from Harvard, and while he was never at the top of his class he was never at the bottom either. The political class had a laughing fit, when, last August, Press Secretary Snow solemnly announced that President Bush had been reading The Stranger. But should that really surprise us?
Read inside accounts from officials who served under Bush and what comes across (even from the disgruntled ones) is a man with a strong grasp of policy. Nor is President Bush, I believe, a zealot. His conversion to evangelism was, while probably not contrived, not nearly as wholesale as we might believe. This is the man who, after all, joked around after his reelection as Texas governor by giving the camera what he called his “one-fingered victory salute.” He, like most mortals, swears in private conversation. (Most famously when a mike caught him cussing with Blair at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg.) Some have even claimed the man may secretly disdain his fellow evangelicals. David Kuo, a former Bush official in the office of faith-based initiatives, wrote in his recent tell all memoir Tempting Faith that “national Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy.’ The pious, stupid Bush we have grown to know is mostly a construction created by the man himself.
It all began, I think, after President Bush’s unsuccessful 1978 run for Congress. his opponent, Kent Hance, skewered him mercilessly for his fancy degrees and Connecticut pedigree. It was then, I think, that Bush realized that what the American people really value deep down inside is a virtuous cowboy.
But then, who is the real man beneath this persona? Will the real George W. Bush please stand up?
Of course, asking that question begets another question: where is the line separating Bush the man from Bush the icon? With our public figures, the dividing line between personal and political is extraordinarily fuzzy. I doubt very much the man himself realizes much a distinction between the two realms. Unlike superheroes, real celebrities don’t lead a separate life of the alter-ego. In today’s media saturated world, privacy is a meaningless concept for those in the spotlight, and what we get is a persona muddled with a personality until the two are difficult to distinguish.
Still though, trying to unravel Bush is a worthwhile effort. There must have been some point in the man’s life where he decided finally to embark upon a public life. My guess is that it was some point after he realized that business was really not his forte. Perhaps it was during the oil bust of the 80’s. Maybe it was after his less-than-stellar management of the Texas Rangers. The point is that during this key decade, while he languished in obscurity, he saw the success that his father and siblings were having in the political arena.
The effect of Bush Sr. on his son has been often discussed, but this is because it was so tremendous. Imagine George W. trying to eke out an existence in the shadow of the President of the United States. It must have been abysmal. Keep in mind that by the first Bush’s Presidency, George W. was already nearing middle age. And what did he have to show for it? A string of failed businesses. So one factor motivating our friend George W. is probably his father.
However, I do not see George’s subsequent political career as an attempt to mimic his father. If anything, Bush’s career has been a continuation of his entire life: he is the “black sheep” of the family, the rebel. Bush Sr. rose to power banking on pragmatism and expert authority in the bureaucracy, using the CIA as a stepping stone to the vice-Presidency. Bush the Younger has taken an entirely different tack, (after all, he tried his father’s way back in 1978) relying on anti-elitism and personal charm to gain political office. I strongly doubt Bush Sr. would ever have proclaimed a “Jesus Day” in the state of Texas. Or even attempted to run for office in Texas, for that matter.
In the same vein Bush’s ideological rigidity may come less from personal conviction, and more from a desire to be perceived as different from his father. Bush Sr. was a consensus-builder, whereas Junior is a bridge-burner. Bush Sr. was cautious in foreign policy, invading Iraq but then sending the divisions back to Kuwait after the Republican Guard was sufficiently decimated. His son is extraordinarily reckless, invading Afghanistan with essentially nothing but a few special ops teams with air support, hoping (correctly) that the Northern Alliance would use the moment to topple the regime in Kabul. He invaded Iraq with a force far smaller than the one used for a much more limited task in 1991. This risk did not turn out as fortuitously.
Pundits have often tried to determine what President Bush’s ideology is phrases like Compassionate Conservatism have been thrown around. Consider the evidence from his administration. President Bush believes in low-taxes, yet high government spending. He advocates freedom and democracy, but his opponents point to Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act, suspension of Habeas Corpus, warrantless wiretapping, Guantanamo Bay, and executive signing statements. These are not the acts of an ideologue. They are the acts of one who has no ideology beyond the exercise of power. Bush lowered taxes and increased spending not because of some nonsensical “big government conservatism” but because that is exactly what any politician would do to increase his popularity if he had no regard for long-term consequences. President Bush is a fair-weather friend of freedom because that is exactly what suits him: freedom is good when it serves his purposes but useless when it serves his enemies.
If I had to summarize Bush, I would say that he is a Machiavellian without ends. That is, he does what it takes but what “it” is that he is trying to achieve isn’t entirely clear. Well that is not precisely true. Bush wanted to be great. He wanted to be better than his father. But his problem was that he never filled his role with meaning. What I have compiled here is less a description of what Bush is than what he is not. He is not an idiot, not an ideologue, not a zealot, not a visionary. Americans would be advised to listen to President Bush speak. Ignore his twang, ignore his clumsy handling of the English language. Ignore these things and what becomes apparent is the void, the lack of meaning he conveys with these words somebody else wrote for him. Notice how his expressions never seem to perfectly fit the words coming out of his mouth. Then, try and figure out who is the man behind those expressionless eyes. At that point, it should become apparent why this self-styled moarlistic Texan identified with The Stranger and the absurdist views of it main character.
