A Northwestern reader emails to signal his relief at the lack of empathy George W. Bush showed during last week’s earthquake. There were no sudden presidential tours of the damage, no lip-biting empathy moments, no hugs, no tears. There was simply a brief presidential announcement of emergency funds being released to help with the aftermath. If part of the relief of the Bush presidency is what won’t happen, this is surely one of the “won’t happen” moments. Finally, American citizens in the aftermath of natural disasters are being treated as grownups.
BUSH’S TRIANGULATION: Looking back on that speech last Tuesday, I’m struck by how Clintonian it was. Bush was no Reagan. There were no calls to arms for the right; and there were absolutely no negative lines against Democrats – or even government. And yet … Bush’s triangulation, so far, is not like Clinton’s. Clinton kept his party base loyal by symbolism and by sentiment. Ideologically, Clinton was unmoored – lunging from one co-opted policy to another. Bush, for all his soothing rhetoric, is keeping his party base close by giving them what they want. His top aides attend the bi-weekly confabs of the conservative movement in Washington, as Fred Barnes reports in the Weekly Standard. Bush’s key strategist, Karl Rove, has an open line to the right-wing for input and advice. John Ashcroft is attorney-general. For all the pressure for Bush to moderate his tax cut, it is the same now as it was when he started his campaign. The hedgehog doesn’t learn new tricks. He just adds new pricks. I keep thinking of Pope John Paul II. No, Bush is nothing like the Pope. But in a way, the current Pope, by his choice of name, sent a message that he was going to be a synthesis of the reformist radical Pope John XXIII and the consolidator Pope Paul VI. Bush, in some ways, is similarly showing himself to be a synthesis of Reaganite radicalism – in tax cuts, social security reform – and Clintonian triangulated centrism. He is President Reagan-Clinton. He has Reagan’s instinct for smaller government, but none of his vision or clarity or intellectual depth. Equally, he has Clinton’s eye for the political middle, for the concrete details of domestic policy that build majorities vote by vote, but without the psychopathic melodrama of the Clinton miniseries. Bush is Reagan cut down to post-Cold War size. He is Reagan’s mini-me.
CLINTON AGONISTES: “A psychopath is not a lunatic suffering from disabling delusions or an obviously neurotic person displaying phobias and anxieties; rather he or she is an outwardly normal person with an apparently logical mind who happens to be an emotional cipher. Hiding behind what Hervey Cleckley called “the mask of sanity,” the psychopath is the extreme case of the nonsocial personality, someone for whom the ordinary emotions of life have no meaning. Psychopaths lie without compunction, injure without remorse, and cheat with little fear of detection. Wholly self-centered and unaware of the emotional needs of others, they are, in the fullest sense of the term, unsocial. They can mimic feelings without experiencing them … In addition, psychopaths are often thrill-seekers, not simply because they discount the bad things that may happen to them if they take risks, but because they are underaroused: that is, their emotional void leaves them bored and restless. Knowing little of true feelings, they cannot rely on their own feelings to supply them with much satisfaction, and so they seek it out from dangerous activities, wild parties, and an agitated sense for excitement.” – James Q. Wilson, “The Moral Sense.”
The Dish 