The country knew his parents, and when Bush gave his word, voters found him believable. He said he would change the tone in Washington and dispel the dark cloud of partisanship that clung to the Capitol. Democratic leader Tom Daschle says Bush has indeed changed the tone, but not for the better. Tom Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, says that relations between the White House and Congress are “the most poisonous in 30 years,” which takes us back to the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Yet the myth of Bush as a bipartisan president who operates above the fray is relentlessly promoted by Bush and his minions. Just this week on the campaign trail, Bush took credit for a huge increase in education funding. Yet he has cut funding below what it was last year, making a mockery of the “Leave No Child Behind” education bill he signed last year with Sen. Ted Kennedy’s blessing. Bush uses words and rhetoric to create an image quite different from reality, a tactic that would normally invite condemnation from both the media and political foes.
When Clinton lied about sex, his critics claimed he couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about anything. When Al Gore bragged about his role in creating the Internet, the Bush camp treated it as evidence of a congenital default in the former vice president’s DNA. Gore could never again be believable.
Wherever the line is between political maneuvering and a character flaw, Bush has more leeway in part because of whom he followed as president. The contrast with Clinton allows Bush to claim a moral high ground that he would not otherwise have. Bush is true to wife Laura, which the public likes. And voters think that unlike Clinton, who seemed too eager to please and compromise, Bush is a man of conviction, as borne out in his single-minded obsession over Iraq.
But it’s not true that Bush is a man of his word. He has shimmied and shifted in lots of areas, including Iraq, manipulating language the way Clinton did and exaggerating in the same way that he once pilloried Gore for doing. Bush says “regime change” doesn’t have to mean deposing Saddam Hussein-that the regime would be changed if Saddam disarmed. This is rhetoric worthy of Clinton, and it doesn’t mean that Bush has altered fundamentally his commitment to displace Saddam through military force.
Even though there is no credible evidence linking the Iraqi president to the 9-11 attacks, Bush persists in suggesting on the campaign trail that Saddam might use Al Qaeda as his “forward army.” Polls show that two thirds of Americans believe Saddam was behind 9-11, a useful myth irresponsibly fed by Bush. The president said in a speech last month that Saddam is experimenting with unmanned drones capable of reaching the United States with weapons of mass destruction. When confronted with the geographical improbability of such a feat, a White House spokesman countered that the drones could be launched from ships. Unless Iraq has an aircraft carrier we don’t know about, that scenario is equally implausible.
But Bush carries on, his reputation for honesty and integrity unchallenged and his image as a plainspoken Texan touted at every turn by his loyal followers. Another case in point is the battle over the proposed Department of Homeland Security. Bush initially had no interest in a big reorganization, probably with justification. It’s a mammoth undertaking; it would take years to accomplish and the payoff in terms of making the country safer is questionable. Yet Bush embraced the idea when the war on terrorism was faltering, and when the legislation stalled in the Senate he saw an opportunity to link national security with Democrats holding up the bill. He could have reached agreement some time ago on the personnel issue blocking its passage, but instead he held out because he knew it would force Democrats to resist him and either look unpatriotic or turn on their base–the federal unions whose job protections are in dispute. “They can see what he’s doing, and they hate what he’s doing, and they despise him as a consequence,” says Mann.
Compared with taking the country to war based on a body of lies, Bush’s duplicity on domestic issues doesn’t seem as egregious, but the pattern is disturbing. On the budget, he has managed (or mismanaged) the biggest fiscal reversal in the country’s history. Part of the loss of revenue is the result of 9-11 and the recession, but Bush has totally abdicated his responsibility in steering the country out of the financial mess. His response is to gloss over the $300 billion loss from the balance sheet, pick a fight with Congress over a symbolic $13 billion appropriations bill and then claim he’s fiscally responsible. “They see the rhetoric obscuring the reality, and it angers them,” says Mann.
There is hardly an issue where Bush hasn’t pulled a fast one. The rules he announced with great fanfare this week to make it easier to move generic drugs onto the market were passed by the Senate in July. Bush opposed them then; now with polls showing voters think he hasn’t done enough on domestic issues, he’s flipped.
How does he get away with such crass duplicity? The media doesn’t want to disturb the story line. Gore was the prevaricator; Bush was intellectually challenged. So when Bush fiddles with the facts, the media doesn’t see malevolence. They see a man who’s not articulate, who doesn’t speak with lawyerly precision. And they can’t believe how believable he is.
