By Gerald S. Rellick
George W. Bush’s dreadful performance at last month’s press conference should have put to rest any doubts of his lack of fitness to be president. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen summed it up this way: “Bush was so inarticulate in his recent news conference that you could say he violated the standards of his own ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy.”
William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a Bush supporter, also voiced dismay. Kristol said he was “depressed” by Bush’s performance, adding that “[Bush] revealed in my mind a failure of presidential leadership."
Nevertheless, in the following week, Bush’s poll numbers hardly moved. So, how then do we understand this strange phenomenon?
The media is the starting point: why is it they give Bush such a free ride? Eric Alterman writes, “When reporters attempt to re-ask Bush a question, he merely repeats the same nonsense he spouted in the first place. With few exceptions, reporters tend to let him get away with it.”
But the media doesn’t just report events; they merge with them as participants in an entertainment event; they become part of the narrative and take their acting cues unconsciously. When he was president, Bill Clinton’s intelligence and articulateness set up a natural adversarial relationship with the press, much of it unconsciously scripted; reporters felt a natural competitive instinct to challenge Clinton, to match wits with him in a part-playful, part-serious jousting match, in an effort to show off their skills in front of peers and the public. George Bush, in contrast, disarms the press with his witlessness. How do you punch a marshmallow? Or better, why would you punch a marshmallow?
A recent “Boondocks” cartoon strip has Huey saying to Caesar: “What’s problematic to me is not that the president is staggeringly dimwitted … but that the press knows he’s staggeringly dim-witted and everyone just pretends that he’s not…. It’s like the presidency has become the Special Olympics and everyone wants to give him an award just for trying.”
But does the press’s demurring to Bush’s weakness of mind explain his public support? Certainly a portion of it, but not all.
In a very fine book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, author Neal Gabler helps us understand this remarkable and uniquely American aberration that is George W. Bush. Gabler begins by explaining that we have entered a “brave and strange new world—the world of postreality,” where major elements of life itself are transformed into a movie and are mentally and emotionally processed in the same way.
We see this postreality world evident in the character and presidency of George W. Bush. Here we find two deviant realities merged, yet differentiated—opposite poles of the same basic entity, as it were. One is the peculiar reality embedded in the mind of George W. Bush—what some call Bushworld—and which in the words of Molly Ivins, “simply does not accord with any known version of reality.”
Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, in his book, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush, describes Bush as trying to capture complex issues in “short slogans that are so oversimplified as to be deceptive.” For example, consider Bush’s statement on his tax cut plan where he told taxpayers that the budget surplus inherited from the Clinton administration was “your money” and the government had no right to keep it. It was enough to make any economist wince.
The other, and more interesting, reality is at the opposite pole—the manner in which elements of the public find in George W. Bush a character in life-the-movie with whom they can relate, although not by any norm of what we think of as defining competence, success, or indeed, strength. For most of us, the image of a shallow, uncertain and inarticulate George Bush befits more the character of the hapless dupe than it does the slick, smooth action hero.
In his book, Gabler recounts the significance of the presidential campaign of 1828 between the populist Andrew Jackson and the scholarly incumbent, John Quincy Adams. Associated with the times was the rise of a deep class antagonism, says Gabler, and the campaign slogan that captured this spirit was, “John Quincy Adams who can write/Andrew Jackson who can fight.” Following Jackson’s victory, there was another expression of populist revolt, in Gabler’s words, “a surge of trash … the scandalmongering penny press, the scathing cheap novel and the pretension-puncturing almanacs.” Gabler argues that this rise of “sensationalist trash was … like the election itself, a willful attempt to raze the elitists’ high culture and destroy their authority.”
While inept in the extreme, Bush is still the choice of many because he succeeds in embodying this same revolt—that of the common, plain-spoken man against the cultural elites, the liberal intellectuals “who want to tell us what to do.” As a conservative speaker once remarked, “In America we don’t need experts; we use common sense.” Indeed, it is this anti-intellectual and anti-establishment impulse running through American life that explains much of the Bush phenomenon. The dumbing-down of the American presidency parallels what we see in American education and culture. Normal standards of intelligence and competence give way to superficiality when it comes to anything that is heavily processed through the media, as is the American presidency. There is a failure to appreciate that life is a difficult and challenging enterprise and that truth and wisdom bought on the cheap, as George Bush sells it, will bear ill fruit.
One can only hope that those Americans who are assuming a passive audience role in Bush-the-movie can yet be jolted into something approximating reality—perhaps recognizing what Naomi Klein calls the “lethal incompetence” of this administration, particularly as it is seen on a daily basis in the military occupation of Iraq. At the time of this writing, the revelations of torture and other abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel were just made public. The awful sense of where America finds itself today was captured in the words of a Buzzflash editorial prophetically written six weeks ago: “This is the darkest hour for our nation…. It is Midnight in America.” It might be added that never before has there been greater need for reason to prevail over emotion and myth, and for Bush-the-movie to close its run.