President George Bush is a year old today. Surprisingly, our low expectations of him have been confounded by his strong leadership
The Bush files - Observer special
Christopher Hitchens Sunday January 20, 2002 The Observer
George Bush chokes on a pretzel while gaping at the television screen, and comes away with a loud blush on his cheek. What a free gift that would once have been. I can do the routine in my sleep: since he utters chunks of twisted and convoluted matter it's no wonder that he ingests the raw material before spewing it.
But do we even believe the cover story about the fall? His reputation for 20 years was that of an obnoxious drunk. Perhaps recent events drove him back to the bottle of bourbon? A pretzel attack doesn't usually involve bruising. Only the other day, he assured an audience of rich people that 'not over my dead body will they raise your taxes'. This amazing mangling of an easy cliché could only invite the question: well, then, Mr President, over whose cadaver will those taxes be increased? This stuff used to write itself, but it isn't quite the same sport as it used to be.
Last week, I was addressing a reasonably large audience in northern California. The region itself is a fairly 'liberal' one and the neighbourhood where I was speaking was actually the home county of John Walker, the sad but famous mujahideen of Marin. None the less, I found that I had a fair degree of support for my pro-war opinions. And then someone got up and read me all the words I had used to describe President Bush only about 12 months ago: 'Uncultured... uneducated... incurious... a glove puppet and proud of it... etc.' Did I, the questioner wanted to know, still believe any of that?
My answer, which was a bit improvised, was this: Mr Bush is still one of the most unqualified people ever to have run for the highest office, let alone to have attained it. There will never come a time when he reads for pleasure or takes a serious interest in another country. But the oldest political joke in America has a double-edged point to it. In this society, anybody can be President. And this particular anybody has happened to match an hour in which it is precisely the ordinary people of the country who have behaved with distinction. There was, I concluded, some reason for ironic pride in this rather mediocre revelation. There are times when it reassuring to be uninspired.
A year or so ago, George Walker Bush looked like a sorry second act to George Herbert Walker Bush (and I was the origin of the unkind remark about the cruel circumcision of his Herbert). He had run a robotic campaign, fuelled by vast quantities of soft money, and had fooled almost nobody by his soft-focus, ethnic-rainbow tactics. Having failed by a good margin to collect a majority of the popular vote, he had succeeded - by delegating things to leathery old legal sharks of his father's generation - in getting a majority of the electoral college vote from a state run by his brother. This was just about enough to salvage the family honour (I was also the origin of the remark about the Clinton years being a nasty interlude between the Bushes) but by no means enough to inspire confidence.
At that time, it was technically true to say that the Republican Party had pulled off the historic achievement of carrying the presidency, the Senate and the House. But the presidency was owed to the Supreme Court, and the swift defection of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who professed himself appalled by the dogmatic conservatism of the Republican leadership, soon returned the upper chamber to Democratic stewardship.
As against that, the President did deliver a surprisingly good inaugural speech, to which more attention should probably have been paid at the time. He spoke about America as having a destiny of its own, but did not beat the chauvinistic drum. And he then made a series of more or less statesmanlike appointments to senior positions. (I say 'more or less' because he handed the Justice Department to former Senator John Ashcroft, a 'born-again' type whose ability to find his way around town unaided is a marvel to all who know him. Still, any President is allowed one partisan nomination.)
Luck stayed with the neophyte, as a cluster of time-delayed Clinton scandals exploded, scandals that Clinton himself had arranged to coincide with his exit from the White House. Seldom has any chief executive got under way with a fairer wind. I wrote at the time that the sky over Washington was blue, blue, blue, but that a huge refrigerator would crash from the heavens at any moment.
I now rather wish I had not phrased it like that. The moral and political universe turns on the axis of 11 September. And that date is a day that Bush would no doubt like to have back again. Unlike any of his predecessors in a time of disaster, he was actually live on camera when the news hit. We saw him squatting on a small chair in a Florida schoolroom, smirking condescendingly at a junior class, when his chief of staff came hurrying in. And then we saw him no more, as the stupid doomsday routines of 'national security' hid him. The official excuse for this - that he had been overruled by his guards - was more panicky and pathetic than the reality. So the Mayor of New York became leader of the free world for a whole week.
But this in its way has been the measure of Bush's success. He has not sought to outgrow his limited stature. He read a fairly good address to a joint session of Congress, in which he let his speechwriters hit a few, but not too many, Churchillian notes. He delegated the big appearances and the major briefings to Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. Apart from one foolish slip, where he used the crass word 'crusade', he was, if anything, too immaculate in his deference to Muslim sensitivities at home and abroad.
In general, he has eschewed the temptations of posturing or grandstanding. Even in the case of his least admirable or competent delegate, John Ashcroft, he has at least publicly, and more than once, favoured proper trials over drumhead tribunals. One does not detect any hint of megalomania. The pretzel episode was itself a reminder of good old couch-potato, sport-loving banality.
One of his closest associates told me that Bush's conservatism was a startling thing to behold, something innate and instinctive. (He meant it admiringly.) To this President, it is an axiom that the rich are the means of elevating the poor, and that it is therefore the rich who need elevation. For a moment, it looked as if the Enron implosion would be the disgraceful disproof of that. But, unless something hideous remains to be disclosed, it now seems that the burst bubble implicates both parties and that at least, politically speaking, there was no really bad 'insider trading'. Some of the President's explanations were a little over-elaborate, perhaps, but the public is hardened to the idea of a shakedown fund-raising system, and the notion that 'they all do it' was driven home very effectively by the last occupant of the Oval Office.
Margaret Thatcher said that the real test of political victory was the ability to change the mind of the other party. And not many people wish that Al Gore and his team had been on the bridge four months ago. By this admittedly exacting standard, Bush has not yet made himself undisputed leader. But he has succeeded in making the other party pay close and respectful attention, which was by no means the case last January.
Overseas, he has tried to have it both ways: finally paying his country's UN dues while scuttling the ABM Treaty. His vices are, in other words, what they would have been anyway - the vices of a provincial American conservative who preferred oilmen as friends, or even oilmen to friends.
His place in the annals will depend on the way in which he can continue to exceed what were, a year ago, the lowest possible expectations.