Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Bush and the Warmest Body

(Reprinted from the issue of January 29, 2004)

Rarely has a candidate suffered so abrupt a deflation as Howard Dean did in the Iowa caucuses. Dubbed the Democrats’ front-runner by the media, clutching a handful of endorsements from such towering figures as Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and Tom Harkin, Dean was poised to lock up his party’s presidential nomination in the depths of winter. Instead, he finished an ignominious third, far behind John Kerry and John Edwards.

Having pronounced Kerry dead long ago, the pundits are now hailing his miraculous resurrection. My own view is that he’s still dead; he just happens to be the warmest body in the Democratic race. Not that I predicted his victory; I merely underestimated Dean’s remarkable gift for alienating voters.

Well, someone has to win this race, if only by default; and Kerry, an entirely conventional liberal, will do as well as anyone. As Democrats go, he’s uncontroversial: he’s pro-abortion, of course, and he favors every feature of the welfare state. He’s the rare Democrat who has never made headlines in the gossip tabloids: no sexual scandals, drug history, fishy real estate deals, Mafia links, or drowned girls.

If his personal life isn’t irreproachable, by today’s standards it’s fairly respectable: He’s married to an extremely rich woman, the widow who inherited the huge Heinz fortune.

Kerry has another qualification for running against George W. Bush: He’s a decorated war hero. He has waffled on the Iraq war, but the Republicans won’t be able to insinuate that he’s afraid to fight, since he served in the Vietnam War. He can afford to criticize Bush’s Iraq policy.

Kerry’s Iowa victory was also a setback for Bush, who was hoping for an easy race against Dean. But the Democrats are afraid of nominating another McGovern, and in Kerry they may have found the electable alternative they’ve been hoping for. He’s liberal, but not scary to most voters. And Bush has already moved so far to the left that conservatives probably won’t see the prospect of a Kerry presidency as a nightmare.

Bush’s State of the Union address was clearly conceived in the expectation that Dean would be the Democrat to beat. He boasted of victory in Iraq and insisted, in implicit rebuke to Dean, that the capture of Saddam Hussein has made the world safer. But Bush’s themes lose their force against Kerry, whose criticism of the war and occupation are less unequivocal than Dean’s and, in fact, reflect the country’s growing doubts about whether the War on Terror is quite the melodrama Bush has tried to make it seem.

The sense of danger that seized us after 9/11 has sharply waned. By November it may seem no great concern at all. Despite all the war hype, there have been no major terrorist incidents in America, only many false alarms. Ubiquitous security measures have come to seem excessive and hysterical.

How real is the terrorist threat? Bush still insists it’s acute. But that requires us to believe that the government has had a 100 per cent success rate in preventing terrorist attacks, while the terrorists have had a 100 per cent failure rate. Neither is credible. There are countless vulnerable “soft” targets in this country, far too many too protect, yet the terrorists haven’t struck again. Is all this expense and inconvenience — and curtailment of liberties we used to take for granted — really necessary?

It hardly seems so. Yet Bush wants to renew the USA PATRIOT Act this year. He is banking on a sense of urgency that has passed. If he calculates that his aura of heroic leadership will carry him to victory this fall, he is courting defeat. Moreover, it is too obviously a political calculation, not a deeply felt need.

Bush’s father won a war too, but its political benefits proved evanescent when he sought reelection in 1992. His high approval ratings, as high as 92 per cent, vanished quickly; he lost his political base, and Bill Clinton defeated him by stressing economic matters. Kerry, with fewer negatives than Clinton, could beat the younger Bush in much the same way.

This year Bush said nothing about the “axis of evil,” though two-thirds of it — the regimes of Iran and North Korea — are still in business. He made the usual flurry of domestic proposals, a standard feature of State of the Union speeches, drawing the usual standing ovations, but none of them carried much conviction or resonance. He said nothing about his own recent proposal to send men (and women, of course) to the moon, Mars, and “across our solar system,” another non-starter.

What Bush lacks, obviously, is a compelling theme rooted in a coherent philosophy. For him government is a confusing miscellany of services, protections, this and that and the other — fighting terror, subsidizing medicine, discouraging drug abuse, upholding the sanctity of marriage, promoting education. In short, an all-intervening state, with no particular rationale and few meaningful limits.

It hardly sounds Republican, let alone conservative. Bush simply has no evident sense of proportion or balance, no restraining impulse to leave things alone and let water find its own level. Now and then he makes a fleeting gesture toward the free market or personal liberty, but he leaves us to wonder how this comports with the many roles he wants government to assume. He is neither consistently socialist nor consistently libertarian; his mind is a succession of anomalies, on which he feels no necessity to impose order of any kind.

Nor does he seem to sense that government intervention is disruptive, or that one intervention may lead to another, in an endless cycle of self-correction: subsidies today, tax breaks tomorrow, successively “protecting” various interests (small businesses, for example) instead of just leaving them all alone.

Many have commented, often with amusement, on Bush’s garbled syntax and daft utterances; but these reflect something more than limited education (after all, he went to Yale) or lack of surface polish. He seems to have no conception of systematic thought or inviolable principle. He only hopes to say whatever he thinks will please or appease his audience at the moment.

All this makes him hard to predict. His conservative supporters miss the point when they think he essentially agrees with them; so do liberal opponents who accuse him of pandering to corporations. Both imagine that there is some hidden consistency, for good or ill, lurking behind his miscellaneous gestures. Both are mistaken. They are looking for a rationale where none exists.

It’s tempting to say that Bush is trying to please everyone. But even that doesn’t quite explain him, since he is clearly willing to make enemies. His Democratic opponent in November, whoever that turns out to be, may find him an oddly elusive target.


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Joseph Sobran