THIS PRESIDENT IS EXACTLY WHAT HE SAYS (via Daniel Merriman):

THE BELIEVER: George W. Bush’s loyal speechwriter (JEFFREY GOLDBERG, 2006-02-13, The New Yorker)

Unlike most speechwriters, who tend to be segregated from policymaking, [Michael] Gerson has always been an influential figure in the White House, in part because he shares Bush’s belief in the power of faith—both men are evangelical Christians—and because he possesses a preternatural ability, his friends say, to anticipate Bush’s thinking. There is a “mind meld” between the two men, Bush’s counsellor Dan Bartlett told me, adding, “When you bring a West Texas approach to the heavy debates of the world, there has to be a translator, and Mike is the translator.”

Gerson is known to his friends for his pre-ironic sensibility, and for his soft heart; I once saw him close to tears when he spoke about AIDS patients in Uganda. But he is also a capable operator. In 2002, a senior White House official told me, Gerson outflanked Dick Cheney, who didn’t want Bush to declare unambiguously his support for a Palestinian state, as Gerson had urged him to do—and as Bush did, in a speech that Gerson wrote. Gerson is also unashamedly guileless in his search for heroes; when he came to Washington, in the late nineteen-eighties, he would sometimes park outside the home of George F. Will, hoping to catch a glimpse of the conservative columnist. And, even in the Bush White House, he is known for his piety. On display in his office is a book called “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” photographs of African-Americans praying. He told the National Journal’s Carl Cannon, last year, that the book “moved me no end.” Cannon then noted, as if in wonderment, “Gerson really speaks this way.”

At a Welliver dinner, the remarks of ex-speechwriters tend toward carefully calibrated irreverence; current speechwriters aren’t expected to gripe or to disclose confidences. But at the 2002 event, Gerson spoke with immoderate earnestness. According to several people who attended, Safire asked Gerson to tell the group something it didn’t know about Bush. Gerson, in a quavering voice, responded with a story that left some of his audience nonplussed. He described a call that he got moments after Bush finished addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Bush thanked Gerson for his work on the speech, to which Gerson replied, “Mr. President, this is why God wants you here.” Gerson then related Bush’s response, as evidence of his thoughtfulness. “The President said, ‘No, this is why God wants us here.’ ”

An uncomfortable silence filled the room, and then one of Bill Clinton’s speechwriters said, in a stage whisper, “God must really hate Al Gore.”

Gerson knows that he is an enigma to the liberal establishment of Washington. He is a churchgoing, anti-gay-marriage, pro-life supply-sider who believes absolutely in the corporeality of Jesus’ resurrection. He is also supremely loyal to an ideological President in a city that tends to grant only posthumous approbation to ideologues, particularly conservative ones. Yet among his role models he counts Martin Luther King, Jr., and the radical evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century, and his chief vocational preoccupation is the battle against infectious disease in Africa. He has won the admiration of many AIDS and debt-relief activists, including the U2 singer Bono, who, in an e-mail, said, “Mike is known as a ‘moral compass’ at the White House. Seems like that compass keeps pointing him in the direction of Africa,” where Gerson has “obviously left a part of himself.” He is popular with reporters, perhaps because he was once one himself, at U.S. News & World Report. He has a self-deprecating manner that the Washington press corps is surprised to find in the Bush White House. “Mike has his own consistencies that defy the normal consistencies in our politics,” E. J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for the Washington Post, said. “For Mike, it’s thoroughly consistent to be pro-life and to work for poor people in Africa.”

Gerson also baffles many Republicans. Unlike the libertarian wing of the Party, he says that the government has a moral duty to help the poor. When Bush, in his first Presidential campaign, criticized small-government Republicanism as “an approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose than ‘Leave us alone,’ ” the head of the Cato Institute suggested that Bush’s speechwriter was moonlighting for Hillary Clinton.

Gerson defends Bush’s tax cuts, which the President’s critics believe not only favor those with the highest incomes but have also left less money for important domestic programs; Gerson believes that free markets and free trade are the best means of lifting people out of poverty, and that lower taxes stimulate both. “The part of Mike I have the most trouble understanding, perhaps because we simply disagree, is how he can square his support for pretty substantial spending for the very poorest among us with a defense of Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people,” Dionne said. “Maybe Mike just buys supply-side economics in a way that I don’t, but most supply-siders don’t think like Mike.”

What's most amusing here isn't just that Mr. Dionne can't grasp the consistency of compassionate conservativism but that he can't see how similar Mr. Gerson is to George W. Bush, and that he should like the President for the same reasons he likes his speechwriter, but can't for reasons of his own personal immaturity and partisanship.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2006 11:05 AM