August 9, 2004
IS W THE ONLY ONE OF THEM NOT STUCK IN '68:
He's Got the Bad-Boy Vote Sewed Up (Jim Sleeper, August 9, 2004, LA Times)
I am looking at a photo of the George W. Bush that you've probably never seen before. It's a sports-action close-up of him at Yale, over a caption written prophetically by a fellow undergraduate more than 30 years ago: "George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying right hook to opposing ball carrier."Never mind that this is a rugby game, alien to most Americans, and that the caption writer's assessment wasn't political. I think it explains one reason why Bush hasn't slid in the polls since John Kerry reported for duty: He owes more than a little something to the "bad boy" vote that no pollster captures as well as this photo and caption do.
What I have in mind here isn't the bad guy in a detective story or the stand-up guy in "The Sopranos," or even some rock-band poseur. He may actually be a good guy most of the time, like millions of this country's mischievous frat boys who like getting away with things but who aren't that bad as long as they don't get into anything too far over their heads.
As president of his chapter of the DKE fraternity, Bush sounded a classic bad-boy note when he said he "didn't learn a damned thing" at Yale. "The reason was that he didn't try," Jacob Weisberg reported this spring in Yale Alumni Magazine. "One year, the star of the football team spotted him in the back row during [course-] shopping period. 'Hey, George Bush is in this class!' Calvin Hill, '69, shouted to his teammates. 'This is the one for us!' "
I was in that room that day. Bush gave them a grinning thumbs up and, I have to admit, everyone laughed.
Mr. Sleeper does okay here until he compares the 19 year old George W. Bush's behavior to that of Bill Clinton in his 50s. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2004 11:34 PM
Is it just me or does his point make no sense at all to others as well. I fail to see that if he is giving Clinton a pass in his 50's and Bush not getting a pass despite his having changed a lot since he was 29 a really bad point to make. It seems as if he is saying that a 50+ year old sloppy cad is OK but a 19 year old who has since grown up is still a 19 year old. NOt true.
Posted by: dick at August 10, 2004 12:33 AMMr. Sleeper seems not to have much of a sense of humor.
Posted by: pj at August 10, 2004 8:14 AMApparently the last paragraph of my column about George Bush, Bill Clinton, and the "bad boy" vote has escaped some people's notice. After arguing that an old photo of George Bush playing dirty in rugby tells us something about him now, I also recall the cheering reception Clinton got from a huge crowd of college boys the day after news of the Lewinsky scandal broke, I end the column by writing, "Whoever wrote that caption under George's rubgy photo would understand. What he shouldn't understand is how anyone could act as if Iraq were jsut rugby or a dalliance. A history lesson ignored might be more like it." I recommend reading the whole 715-word column. Its point is that character is destiny.
Posted by: jim sleeper at August 12, 2004 10:16 AMYes, but your character--particularly if you're born again--isn't fully formed at 19, is it?
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