Bush Bashing

By John Powers, LA Weekly. Posted November 19, 2002.

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
--George Orwell

Long before the Republicans' victory on November 5, George Bush was already tormenting his opponents. They'd watched him get away with murder -- using "compassionate conservatism" to further enrich the rich and impoverish the government, turning the War on Terror into an instrument of imperial hubris, and feigning outrage at the corporate crimes committed by his fellow crony capitalists while secretly working to dilute any remedy. But the agony came to a head on that Tuesday night when the country was told that Bush's "historic" success in midterm elections was proof of just how popular he is.

Now, you could hardly blame Bush and Co. for gloating about how much they weren't gloating -- after all, they'd won. But during hours of coverage most memorable for James Carville putting a wastebasket over his head, you hoped that at least one of those countless newsfolk would find a moment to inject some skepticism into the triumphalist official storyline. You know, point out that anomalous-seeming midterm results are not unprecedented (at the peak of the Clinton impeachment fever in 1998, Democrats gained House seats), or maybe ponder the unseemliness of a commander in chief who, on the brink of leading his country into war, would set new records for fund-raising and campaigning on behalf of a single party. Dream on.

Of course, Bush has enjoyed a soft ride from the very beginning. You got some inkling why if you watched Journeys With George, Alexandra Pelosi's breezily vacuous behind-the-scenes HBO documentary about traveling on the press plane with Bush's 2000 campaign. If you think the Iraqi parliament is supine ... Even as George W. demonstrated his skill at joking with media folk he actually disdains (he'd obviously honed his banter in countless frat houses and locker rooms), the press corps revealed itself as a pack of self-described lemmings who weren't about to risk their access by asking the candidate tough questions. They did what they were told, asked Bush for his autograph (!) and fawned like those desperate chicks on The Bachelor each time he strolled back to their area of the plane. Where the reporters on the Democratic plane actively disliked Gore -- turning his coverage negative -- the opposite was clearly true with Bush. As the Financial Times' Richard Wolffe told Pelosi, "He charmed our pants off."

Their pants have stayed off, and Bush has been not so much reported on as robed in mythology. At first, the media failed to unmask the carefully crafted myth that he's a political centrist (his policies may be even more right-wing than Reagan's) and helped perpetuate the tired myth that he's a dope, an idea that, astonishingly, we're still supposed to find screamingly funny: Last week's Saturday Night Live opened with a skit in which Bush keeps getting confused about the number of U.S. senators. You're slaying me, dude.

After 9/11, the press began selling us a third myth -- that Prince Hal Bush was inexorably growing into his job. He was compared to both plainspoken Harry Truman and, once his speechwriters began cribbing from famous speeches, the eloquent Winston Churchill. Yet, he has never been so lionized as he is today, now that the conventional wisdom has him bestriding the narrow world like a colossus. Andrew Sullivan has compared him to JFK, a New York Times article declared "A Bush Dynasty Begins To Look Real," and The Weekly Standard's David Brooks has offered doubters a warning: "Never, ever, ever underestimate George W. Bush. It took me two years of being wrong about Bush before finally I got sick of it. The rest of the pundit class had better catch on. He is a leader of the first order."

Behold the wisdom of the power worshippers. Me, I recall how Papa Bush enjoyed an even better first two years than his son -- overseeing the collapse of communism, "winning" the Gulf War -- and still got the boot after a single term. As Orwell wisely suggests, what's happening now doesn't have to keep happening forever.

Such a thought may be the only consolation left for the Democratic Party, which, ever since the Republicans stole the presidency and learned the dark arts of Clintonian triangulation, has been little more than a defeated ooze, like a mollusk that has misplaced its shell. Faced with a hard-line Republican president whose values most Americans don't share, the party has been terrified of standing up to Bush's personal popularity. That job has fallen to liberal-left pundits who've spent the last 22 months wondering why a press corps that obsessively nailed Clinton and Gore for small, private fibs keep failing to point out the president's habitual dishonesty on huge public issues such as taxes and war.

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