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Bush’s Place in History
 Back
in 2000, candidate George W. Bush described
himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” If we didn’t all
remember that, you’d think I’d made it up. Now Bush has
dubbed himself “the decider.”
Well,  things
change, people change, and our perceptions of them change; but with Bush,
everything has changed, and in the most startling way, beginning with his
election. The electoral vote was so close that it came down to a single state
where the popular vote was virtually even — and the governor of that
state was Bush’s brother!
This set the tone for what I can
only call the most improbable presidency in American history. Today the
country is so bitterly divided, and Bush’s poll ratings are so abysmal,
that it takes an effort to recall how successfully he did, at times, unite the
voters. After the 9/11 attacks his popularity approached unanimity. He had
a lock on patriotism. Support for his War on Terror, wherever he might
choose to take it, was so impressive that one usually skeptical liberal pundit,
Michael Kinsley, pronounced him “a great leader.”
Then, during the 2004 campaign,
the polls strongly indicated that America was evenly divided again. It looked
as if the Bush-Kerry vote might be as close as the Bush-Gore vote had been.
But then Bush won a decisive victory, leading a Republican triumph and
boasting of his “political capital.” Only a few months after his
second inauguration, that capital was exhausted. As the war in Iraq went bad,
he committed blunder after blunder. Gaffes like (to name just one) his
nomination of the pitiful Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court made him
look ludicrously incompetent.
Today Republicans are afraid to be
associated with him, and the Democrats are murmuring hopefully about
impeachment. Even his hard core is shrinking, as conservatives belatedly
notice that Bush is, to say the least, a very odd sort of conservative. Under
his rule, big government is bigger than ever, and is committed to even more
explosive growth in years to come.
![[Breaker quote for
Bush's Place in History: Our most miscellaneous president]](2006breakers/060509.gif) Another liberal pundit, E.J. Dionne Jr.,
rejoices that the country is reacting against “the failure of
conservative policies and the declining appeal of conservative
rhetoric.” Really? And just which “conservative” policies
would those be?
Bush’s policies have in fact
been so confusingly miscellaneous that it’s hard to know just what to
call them. He has given us monstrous increases in government power with
heavy doses of conservative rhetoric. The rhetoric, until recently, has
assured conservatives that he is “one of us” at heart, which is
the way Republicans usually snare conservative hearts.
Conservatives also rally to any
politician who can make liberals hate him, as Bush has done more
successfully than any pol since Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, Bush has a way of
enraging liberals even while trying to appease them. On top of that, he must
hold the record for irritating mannerisms, from smirks to swaggers to
defiantly inept English.
Seldom has one man gotten on so
many people’s nerves for so many different reasons. Some think
he’s a war criminal, others think he’s just a boor. He’s
miscellaneously annoying, like an unusually smug ax murderer with bad breath
who can’t tell a joke and attends a weird church. When you try to put
your exasperation into words, you hardly know where to start.
Some of the credit must go to
Bush’s supporting cast, starting with his vice president. Dick Cheney
is another source of miscellaneous irritations. John Nance Garner, one of
Franklin Roosevelt’s veeps, once said the vice presidency
“isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit” (though he actually
named another bodily fluid), but Cheney seems to think that if you have a
pitcher of warm spit, you should make lemonade. If Garner had a lesbian
daughter, she kept it to herself and didn’t do books and interviews
about it. I’m not sure what the moral is here, but I do know this: the
Bush era makes even less sense than the Clinton era did.
It’s a crazy time, when the
old verities don’t seem to apply anymore, except that Kennedys are
still being arrested. Bush and his people have only aggravated the situation.
One small consolation is that the Bushes are unlikely to have airports,
schools, and stadiums named after them. It looks as if their place in history
is already secure.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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