CATCHIN' THE EXPRESS:

REMEMBER THE ALAMO: How George W. Bush reinvented himself. (NICHOLAS LEMANN, 2004-10-18, The New Yorker)

When something important doesn’t turn out the way you expected, you go back to the beginning and try to see if there were clues you missed. In the summer of 1999, I drove up to Cooperstown, New York, for my first view of George W. Bush in action as a politician. I thought of it as a trip in the spirit of the opening scene of “All the King’s Men,” where Jack Burden goes to see Willie Stark in a small-town appearance so that he can find out what the fuss is about. Bush was going to Cooperstown for the induction of Nolan Ryan—Texan, former Texas Ranger, all-time strikeout leader—into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was already in the thick of running for President, so he had other business to attend to as well; there was a fund-raiser for him in Cooperstown, and he had a long private discussion with Governor George Pataki that people thought might be Pataki’s Vice-Presidential audition. But he was plainly going out of his way to make time for Ryan.

Besides the induction ceremony, there was an event in an auditorium for Bush, Ryan, and the press. Bush ambled onto the stage without a lot of ceremony. He was wearing a light-colored sports jacket and slacks, and he made a crack about how Ryan was lucky enough to be able to come out in shorts and sandals. With evident relief, Bush declared that he wasn’t there to talk about politics—just sports. The main impression he made was of a man who liked baseball a great deal and admired Nolan Ryan extravagantly. Ryan exemplifies a certain type of Texas maleness, a type that Bush seems to hold almost in awe, perhaps because, contrary to perceptions in Blue America, Europe, and places of that sort, in the Texas context Bush isn’t as brawnily masculine as it gets. (Bush is a guy who hunts doves and quail but not deer.) Ryan is tall, laconic, devoted to church and family, rural by upbringing and current residence and urban only by the temporary necessity of playing major-league ball. And tough as hell.

In answer to a question from the audience, Bush alluded, with a low chuckle, to what I’d heard from friends in Texas was his favorite Nolan Ryan moment—on August 4, 1993. Ryan, on the mound at Arlington Stadium, with Bush not far away, in the owner’s box, struck Robin Ventura, of the Chicago White Sox, with a pitch. Ventura lost his temper and charged the mound. Ryan, who was then forty-six years old, twenty years Ventura’s senior, caught Ventura in a headlock and delivered six blows to his head and face, from a distance of about six inches, really whaling the shit out of him. The scene quickly became a canonical bit of sports video. It’s a wonderful example of super-aggressive behavior presenting itself as a form of self-defense when, strictly speaking, it isn’t—Ryan had started things by hitting Ventura, after all. But Ryan got to be doubly the hero, slower to anger but also unquestionably physically dominant. Bush, obviously, loved it. “It was a fantastic experience for the Texas Rangers fans,” he said. [...]

Last summer, I interviewed one of Bush’s oldest friends, Clay Johnson, in connection with a “Frontline” documentary on the Presidential election, and heard a new version of Cheney’s selection, one that reveals even more about Bush. Johnson—a Texan who met Bush at Andover and was his roommate at Yale, and who is currently a deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, having worked for Bush during his entire career as an elective officeholder—said that Bush had begun the Vice-Presidential selection process by offering the nomination to Cheney. “The now Vice-President declined the option, but did agree to head up the search committee,” Johnson said. “And then came back some months later and said that in fact he’d changed his mind and he would be willing to run—to be the President’s running mate.” Johnson said he had a hunch about what had changed: “Lynne Cheney told some mutual friends of ours that she and Dick decided that in fact they did want to join the Bush ticket, because they came to really like George and Laura, and the Vice-President came to realize that the President wanted to come up here to really make a difference. He was not going to try to play it safe. Not try to extend an easy, moderately successful four years into an easy, moderately successful eight years. He was going to try to come up here and make dramatic changes to the issues he thought needed to be addressed. And the Vice-President got very, very energized and excited about doing that. And so now we have Dick Cheney as Vice-President.”

In other words, the team that most people thought of as being made up of a moderate, conciliatory, relatively unambitious Presidential candidate and his bland, self-effacing, government technician of a running mate had thrown in together on the basis of a mutual decision to govern in pursuit of radical change. And they have done that. [...]

President Bush, Hughes remarked, “believes that you use campaigns to build support for the things you want to do when you’re in office.” This is true, and the constant barrage of charges (most of them flung by the Bush camp) in this campaign has obscured what Bush has set forth, on a separate track, as his goals for his second term. He is not secretive; quite often, he has laid out ambitious plans months or years before they were launched, in the texts of public speeches of the sort that Washington usually doesn’t pay much attention to—so-called “major policy addresses.” Bush likes to put down markers that permit him a great deal of latitude. During his first six months in office—before September 11th, that is—he changed things to a degree that one would associate with somebody who had won in a landslide, not in a tie. In Bill Clinton’s last year in office, the federal government had a surplus of $236.4 billion, and the surplus was rhetorically dedicated, for all time, to a metaphoric “lockbox” devoted to the two biggest domestic federal programs, Social Security and Medicare. Bush cut taxes to such an extent, even before the war on terror began, that the surplus was likely to evaporate (the government is now running a four-hundred-and-twenty-two-billion-dollar deficit), and the lockbox, supposedly a defining feature of American politics, is a distant memory.

Before September 11th, Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Kyoto accords on global warming, and he had signalled a desire to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the International Criminal Court. He launched a program to develop missile defense, with a view to changing American nuclear strategy fundamentally. He avoided direct dealings with Yasir Arafat, of the Palestinian Authority, which was a departure from the practice of the Clinton Administration, and he committed the United States to defend Taiwan against attack, which represented a tilt against China that the previous six Presidents had chosen not to make. And he was trying to find a way to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Bush said, “We are staying on the offensive, striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. And we are working to advance liberty in the broader Middle East, because freedom will bring a future of hope and the peace we all want. And we will prevail.” This statement leaves Bush a lot of room for further maneuvering in the Arab world in a second term. Another act that received insufficient attention was his cutting off of relations, in 2003, with Muhammad Khatami, the elected head of state in Iran—whom the Clinton Administration had treated as a friend—which followed a year of openly wishing for the overthrow of Khatami’s government. As Iran moves toward having nuclear weapons—the evidence is much clearer than it was in the case of Saddam Hussein—and increasingly exerts its influence in Iraq in a way that is harmful to American interests, it’s hard to imagine that Bush won’t feel he has to act. Pakistan is unstable (President Pervez Musharraf has survived multiple assassination attempts), and it has nuclear weapons. No President could allow Musharraf to fall and let Pakistan’s weapons get into the wrong hands in the aftermath, and Bush would surely respond more forcefully, and less cautiously, than another President confronted with that situation.

Quite often this year, Bush has wondered publicly about the desirability of fundamental changes in the tax system and in Social Security. He doesn’t speak about the deficit as a problem to be solved, and that is probably because he doesn’t regard it as such. Instead, the prevailing view in the White House seems to be that big government deficits might actually be a force for good, because they make it impossible for government to grow. (In this respect, Bush is much more like Ronald Reagan than like his father, who raised taxes to close the deficits that Reagan policies had helped create and, partly as a result, lost his reëlection campaign.) Bush is already trying to make permanent some early tax cuts that were passed with expiration dates, and that would increase the deficit more. He has also speculated during campaign appearances about abolishing the progressive income tax in favor of a flat tax, or replacing the income tax altogether, with a national sales tax or a value-added tax, like the one he proposed unsuccessfully in Texas in 1997. During his first term, he appointed a little-noticed commission on the future of Social Security, which has called for phasing out the existing system of universal government-administered retirement benefits and phasing in personal retirement accounts. (Bush has called for some variant of this idea in every State of the Union address.) Even Republicans in Congress balked, and nothing happened; but now the Administration is planning a campaign to change Social Security along the lines that the commission recommended. The prescription-drug-benefit bill that Congress passed last year has a provision—which, again, didn’t get much notice—to do the same thing in health care, by establishing individual “health savings accounts” as an alternative to the government’s guaranteeing medical coverage.

Bush, unlike his father, is drawn to big, landscape-changing ideas, and—also unlike his father—he thinks like a politician. Much of what he has planned for the second term is meant to serve the goal of making the Republican Party as dominant in national politics as Bush’s foreign policy means to make the United States in world affairs. The Democrats are the party of government; systematically reducing government’s ability to provide services, its employment base, and its role as a provider of the two most essential guarantees, pensions and medical care, cuts off the Democrats’ oxygen supply. In his first term, Bush has won confirmation for two hundred and one of his two hundred and twenty-six appointees to the federal judiciary—all but two of them Republicans—and in a second term he would likely get the opportunity to appoint as many as three Supreme Court justices.

In early 2000, writing about Bush in these pages, I said that he seemed to want to become President very badly, but that he did not seem to want to do a lot once in office. Boy, was I wrong! If the voters give Bush a second term, he would, it seems, govern with the goal of a Franklin Roosevelt-level transformation—in the opposite direction, of course—of the relation of citizen to state and of the United States to the rest of the world. He would pursue ends that are now outside what most people conceive of as the compass points of the debate, by means that are more aggressive than we are accustomed to. And he couldn’t possibly win by a smaller margin than last time, so he couldn’t possibly avoid the conclusion that he had been given a more expansive mandate.

Perhaps it took the coming election to focus their attention, or perhaps it was the majestic sweep of the President's Acceptance Speech at the Convention, but it does seem that folks all of a sudden noticed they're in the midst of a revolution over the past few weeks and that November 2nd is going to accelerate it greatly.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 12, 2004 4:57 PM