THE METHOD TO THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE:

Why Bush is America's natural leader, stupid (Charles Moore, 09/04/04, The Telegraph)

What single fact tells you more about George W Bush and American politics than any other? That he converted from his family's Anglicanism and became a Methodist.

It is inconceivable that such a thing would happen in Britain. In the first place, Methodism has almost collapsed in this country. There are hardly any Methodists left here, let alone converts.

More to the point, the habit in Britain is the other way round. If you start life as a Methodist and then rise in the world socially, you tend to graduate ("convert" is much too strenuous a word) to Anglicanism. And even if, like Mr Bush, you wanted to distance yourself from your privileged upbringing, it would not occur to you to do so by becoming a Methodist. Buddhist, Ba'hai, Muslim even, but not a Methodist.

You could scarcely be more New England Anglican (or, as they call it, Episcopalian) posh than the Bush family. The reason the President is called George is that one of his great-grandfathers, George Herbert Walker, was named after George Herbert, perhaps the greatest poetic voice of Anglicanism ("Teach me, my God and King…" etc).

Those three names were duly given to the future George Bush senior at his baptism, and he passed the George and the Walker on to his son. The Bushes are Yale and Andover and Wall Street and all that: George W is the 13th cousin once removed of the Queen. Religion in those parts may be serious, but it is not worn on the sleeve.

Methodism was a purifying movement within Anglicanism. Eventually, it broke with its mother Church and claimed an independent existence as a cleaner, simpler, more personal faith, one that rejected worldly status. Bush junior's conversion follows that path - a turning away from personal failure (in his case drinking and getting nowhere) through a direct experience of God, a journey away from social grandeur to something that seemed more rugged, a journey from Connecticut to Texas.

No doubt this journey was and remains profound and sincere, but it was also brilliant politics. Mr Bush has the good fortune to be considered stupid by his opponents, so they don't study him properly. What he has done is not stupid at all: he has found a way of embodying and uniting the different strands of conservatism in America.

One interesting thing about this campaign is that if you study who Mr. Bush was several decades ago you'll learn nothing about who he is today. But you need study nothing more about Mr. Kerry than who he was in 1971 in order to grasp him entire. Like all too many of the Boomers he's a poster boy for arrested development. Mr. Bush grew up.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2004 8:35 PM