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The
Reluctant President
Frank Bruni's insight into Bush
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 he is also connected 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 good 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 its man once dismissed as a bumbling moron. And
he's only a little over a year into his first term.
March 17, 2002, The Sunday Times of London
copyright © 2002 Andrew Sullivan |
