I’m writing this in a Starbucks in Dearborn, Michigan, (love will find a way), after a trip to LA and back to Ptown tomorrow, before NYC and then back to DC. Blogging may be a little erratic. It was fun in LA. Hanging with Bill Maher, in so far as I can remember anything from after the show, is never boring. I met Frank Gehry on the flight over as well. He overheard my talking to my London editor about my column and chimed in with an anti-Bush comment. Amazing how being pro ar anti-Bush is now a significant cultural and psychological marker in the country. My own mixed feelings are pretty rare these days. Gehry sure didn’t seem to have any.
BUSH AND THE WAR: Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the Republican convention and the Bush campaign is to present the president as a war-leader in the abstract. The most celebrated images were from the wreckage of 9/11 when Bush spoke the only truly inspired off-the-cuff remarks of his presidency. The actual concrete details of his war-leadership – the fall of Kabul, the blitzkrieg to Baghdad, the aborted siege of Fallujah – were absent. So too the protracted negotiations at the U.N. or any images of Bush with foreign leaders, or the decision to advance the war by days to get Saddam (more bad intelligence) or even the speech that launched the Iraq war. What I think the Republicans have realized is that the war on terror is far more popular and winning an issue for Bush if it is stripped of its actual events, and setbacks and triumphs and difficulties. That’s why the convention rhetoric approached propaganda – focusing not on what has happened, but on the virtues of a strong war-leader. The dynamics of both wars – of instant military success, followed by damaging and difficult follow-through – were deliberately obscured. This is good politics; but it strikes me as risky war-management. People need leaders who level with them about failures and difficulties in wartime – not gauzy North Korean-style biopics about the invincibility of the Great Leader. But then this war, vital as it is, has been exploited by the Bushies for political purposes since it began. How else to explain the “Mission Accomplished” photo-op or the bare-knuckled 2002 Congressional campaign? Some on the left would have politicized this war under any circumstances. But others might have rallied to a war that was conducted with less hardball domestic politics. In this, Bush is, of course, the opposite of Churchill, who brought in opposition leaders to play key roles in his war-cabinet. I know that’s not the American tradition, but a little less politics might have gone a long way. And made the middle-ground voter a little more sympathetic to the narrative that the Republicans are now so effectively deploying.
DIVIDE, DIVIDE: One other thing has troubled me, after mulling the NYC convention for a few days. It struck me that John Kerry at his convention did something politically shrewd but also historically significant. He took a reluctant Democratic base and emphatically backed the war on terror. Yes, he did not relinquish criticism of the war in Iraq, nor of the way in which the Bush administration had made the case for war. But it was not a left-wing convention, and it signaled a welcome shift among Democrats to a more war-oriented approach. The Republicans essentially responded by throwing back this concession in John Kerry’s face. They refused to take “yes, but” for an answer, and dredged up the divisions of the Vietnam War as a means to further polarize the electorate. Again, this might be good politics, but it is surely bad for the country. I believe in this war, which is also why I believe it is important to get as many Democrats to support it. But the Republicans have all but declared that this is a Republican war – and can only be conducted by a Republican president. I think they will live to regret this almost as much as the country will. And I fear the animosity and division that are already part of the cultural fabric (by no means all fomented by the president) could get worse in the coming years – to the glee of our enemies. In wartime, unity matters. When a campaign deliberately tries to maximize polarization to its advantage, it simultaneously undermines the war. Winning this war is more important than building a new Republican majority. But somehow I don’t think that’s how Karl Rove sees it.
OLD EUROPE ON THE BRINK: Will Hutton rightly observes the slide toward steep decline in France and Germany. But he’s wrong about Europe as a whole. Britain, unshackled by Thatcher from socialist economics, is as vibrant as it’s ever been in the past fifty years – culturally and economically. Hutton, of course, frets that this coud mean the end of the EU as a viable institution. Man, I hope so.
The Dish 