Despite the mounds of ink expended on the current president of the United States, he’s still in many ways a mystery. Before September 11, he was widely ridiculed in the press – especially abroad – as a know-nothing, word-mangling, privileged hick who barely won the election. After September 11, his measured and calm response to the attack, his handling of the international crisis, his oratorical skills, and his deft management of the military have given an altogether different impression. In a matter of months, the conventional image of Bush has been effectively whip-lashed. And now that we have a little distance from the alleged turning point of last September, the result is unnervingly incoherent. Who, after all, is the real Bush? The jokester or the statesman? The bumbler or the war leader? The cipher or the captain?
A terrific, if modest, little book, “Ambling Into History,” has just attempted an answer to that question and it has Washington chatting. It’s by the New York Times’ political reporter, Frank Bruni, who covered Bush during the election campaign. Bruni’s no conservative; in fact, he’s a moderately liberal man working for a left-liberal paper. But he’s a good reporter and, because he wrote fair columns on Bush throughout the campaign, became a favorite of the president-to-be. Dubya called him “Panchito” – a diminutive, Spanish version of Frank. He’d pinch Panchito’s cheeks, hug him from time to time, and tease him about his bosses. “At least twice, on the campaign plane,” Bruni writes, “I felt someone’s hands closing tight on my throat and turned around to see the outstretched arms of the future president of the United States, a devilish and delighted gleam in his eyes. He once even put his index fingers in my ears to illustrate that a comment he was about to make would be off the record. On another occasion, he grabbed the sides of my head with his hands, pressed his forehead against mine and made a sound not unlike that of a moderately exasperated pooch.”
This is the goofy Bush, the man who allegedly started waving at Stevie Wonder at a recent Washington concert, only to realize his stupidity and crack up at the whole interaction. This is the Bush who started a “stickball” team at college and christened it “the Nads,” so as to ensure that the chants from the stands would be “Go Nads! Go Nads!” This is the Bush who does a mean Dr. Evil impression from Austin Powers (one of his favorite movies), who “when he ate French fries, dipped them into puddles of ketchup deeper and broader than anyone over the age of twelve typically amasses,” and who, when asked what he had in common with Tony Blair ventured Colgate toothpaste. One of his favorite gags was going up to bald friends and colleagues, laying his bare palms on their heads and intoning like Billy Graham, “Heal!” Like most jokes, these are all a matter of taste. But if, like me, your most treasured videos are Animal House, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Airplane!, you might get along with the current occupant of the White House quite well.
But does this make Bush unserious or somehow dumb? On the latter question, few but hardcore Democratic partisans in Washington still dispute the man’s sharp intelligence. He has mangled words, but he has hardly mangled his politics. From beating a popular incumbent governor of Texas to winning a landslide second term as governor, he kept turning his opponents into political puree. Against an incumbent vice-president who should have won in a landslide, Bush eked out a victory and, with shrewd tactics, played the post-election recount game better than Gore. Before September 11, he barely dipped below 57 percent approval ratings, and since he has barely hovered below 80 percent. This record is not that of a stupid person. And, of course, on a simple level, there was never any evidence that he was the moron he was made out to be. Bush got better marks in college than Gore or John McCain. He’s a graduate of Yale and Harvard. As Bruni points out, the current president is also “a pretty steady consumer of books.” Bruni admits his early dismissal of Bush’s book-smarts was more prejudice than reality.
The truth is that Bush is both serious and unserious. He larks about but he also concentrates. He started prepping for his campaign debates with Gore months before they happened, and beat Gore handily in all three. His sometimes hilarious locutions are not a function of stupidity or dyslexia. They are a kind of genetic defect. His father was far worse. But no-one accused the father of stupidity. Dubya’s occasional recitation of stock phrases is also not because he can’t think of anything else, or doesn’t know anything else. They’re part of his famous ability to maintain message discipline, even at the expense of making himself look stupid. To understand his hesitancy to go off the cuff, you have to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose every word is recorded and every mistake read back to him. What’s amazing in retrospect is not that he hasn’t screwed up verbally plenty of times – but how few occasions there have been in which it really mattered. And then there are the simple urban legends. He is renowned for having said, for example, “Is our children learning?” One Democratic party hack even published an anti-Bush book with that as the title. What Bush actually said was, “Is … are children learning?” He started to say one thing and then said another. By making ‘are’ ‘our,’ his opponents thought they had located his obvious weakness.
They didn’t. As Bruni realized, Bush’s simplicity, his gaffes, his colloquialisms, his goofing around, actually turned into a political advantage. ‘I always got the sense,” Bruni writes, “that his antics were in part an acknowledgement or assertion that a well-adjusted person could not approach all of the obligatory appearances, grandiose pageantry and forced gallantry toward the news media with a totally straight face. It made him likable. It made him real.” Compared to the straight-laced, humorless, pious Gore, Bush was a godsend to the country’s culture – a bit like electing Rory Bremner to succeed Tony Blair.
But the other side to Bruni’s portrait is an underlying gravity that keeps the lightness anchored. Like many deeply religious men, Bush engages the world with a certain detachment, and that detachment can sometimes be expressed in frivolity, irony, fun, or self-mockery. There is a very bearable lightness about being Bush. But he can only be so playful because he is so anchored. He is connected to faith but also to a profound love of his country and its destiny. This connection is, like all patriotism, rooted not in the head but the heart. At one point in a summer lull in the campaign, Bush spoke with Bruni on the campaign plane and inexplicably got teary-eyed. Looking back on his campaign, he was asked about his feelings if Gore were to win. “Seriously, I would respect that. I’m not going to like it. But this is democracy,” he said. He went on: “I love the system and I love the country. I love what America stands for. I don’t want to sound Pollyanna-ish about it, but I do… I am so honored to be one of two coming down the stretch. I am.” He meant it. And tears welled up.
One of his most memorable moments in the days after September 11 was when tears came again. He was in the Oval Office and he was asked how these events had affected him. “Well,” Bush said, “I don’t think about myself right now. I think about the families, the children. I am a loving guy.” And his voice cracked. That’s when the country bonded. And only from the depths of such sorrow can come the iron determination to see the crisis through, to ensure to the best of his ability that it would never happen again. His emotional core is connected to his lightness of spirit. He is secure in what he loves. And the very simplicity and depth of his patriotism is more in tune with most Americans than with some other members of the media or political elite. That’s why the bond is so strong. And that’s why it will last.
But perhaps the most striking thing about Bruni’s account is its picture of an essentially reluctant president. It took Bush a long time to be reconciled to the huge sacrifices – of privacy, leisure, routine, family – that becoming president would entail. In the campaign, he’d long to get back home; he missed his children; he brought his own pillow at all times to remind him of the familiar. Even now, he loves being on his Texas ranch, he carves out immovable personal time, he is religious about his workouts, he leaves work early. This isn’t merely management style. It’s a statement of what’s important. It’s about not losing yourself, or your familiar landmarks and habits, while you enter truly unknown and terrifying territory. At an almost ridiculous level, you can see this entirely in one simple incident. One on particularly grueling campaign flight, Bush “glanced in horror at the slivers of sushi that we had been served during the flight and held his peanut butter and jelly sandwich high like a chalice. ‘This is heaven, right here,’ he proclaimed.”
You can and probably should make fun of this. But at a deeper level, it’s also revealing. Bush knows what he knows. He knows who he is. He likes who he is. And this small piece of wisdom is doubtless what keeps him sane. He has an instinctive understanding of limits, of what can and cannot be done, of the human scale by which all political achievements must be measured. It’s redolent of a natural, temperamental conservatism that prefers, in Michael Oakeshott’s words, “the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” That doesn’t mean that such an instinctively conservative person like Bush cannot be energetic, or wage war. In fact, I think Bush’s rage at the disruption to the meaning of America on September 11 is the fuel for his ruthless determination to fight back and win. So lightness begets seriousness, detachment begets engagement, and a natural conservatism begets a determined and adventurous war. These are just some of the more interesting paradoxes of this man once dismissed as a bumbling moron. And he’s only a little over a year into his first term.
The Dish 