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Predictably, the final press conference of the man who is bucking to be ranked among America’s worst Presidents was an interesting affair. If we think back to Ronald Reagan’s famous, “Are you better off…” quotation, George Bush ranks right at the top of Presidents who made messes rather than cleaned them up.
It can be argued even the much-maligned Herbert Hoover in part was victimized by circumstances beyond his control. His sins were in how he played the hand he was dealt. Bush, on the other hand, has created so many crises you don’t know where to start as you run through the list. There is the economy and our record deficit brought on by carrying Lyndon Johnson’s “guns and butter” to an absurd extreme. Bush even went Johnson one better by starting his war and then persisting in giving money back to the tycoons who have been the heart of the GOP for over a century.
I was reading an account of Franklin Roosevelt’s tour of World War I battlefields yesterday and it struck me that what Roosevelt observed serves as a metaphor for what George Bush has done to this country. The land FDR walked over had been completely transformed as if a giant plow has been pulled through it and churned up everything in its path, leaving the earth looking like a perverse landfill in which human remains, trees, vehicles, weaponry were all mixed together.
What stood out for me in reading the transcript of the Bush press conference were not the pathetic attempts to justify actions that bankrupted this nation both domestically and internationally, both fiscally and morally, but a comment he made in answer to a question about the incoming administration [transcript here].
And the other thing is, when I get out of here, I’m getting off the stage. I believe there ought to be, you know, one person in the klieg lights at a time. I’ve had my time in the klieg lights.
This has to be one of the most bizarre views of the American Presidency ever advanced by a sitting President. Bush is likening serving in the White House with Hollywood or Broadway. The President is an actor playing a role, not a leader. If Ronald Reagan had made this remark if would have been a bit understandable, but coming from Bush it is far more bizarre and therefor far more interesting.
The Presidency as Makeover
Hollywood, of course, is all about artifice and nothing symbolizes artifice as much as America’s penchant for makeovers. How George W. Bush became president is certainly THE greatest make over story of our times and you must understand, as I think most Americans do, that the make over is the key.
Make overs have been the stock-in-trade of television reality shows, women’s and men’s magazines and innumerable local newspaper contests. The antecedents lie in yellowing old comic strip ads of 98 pound weaklings having sand kicked in their face and faded black-and-white video tapes of you-can-look-like-a-movie-star hair permanent commercials.
The contemporary make over artist is a modern necromancer who mutters some psychobabble mixed with just enough common sense and pseudo science that a wave of the magic product exacts a miraculous transformation worthy of the most venerated medieval saint.
What makes the script sizzle is the object of the make over. This cannot just be some ordinary citizen any more than a saint bothers himself or herself with healing some victim of the common cold. The object must be truly abject, someone deformed by humpbacked irregularities and sporting the equivalent of odiferous, leprosy-like sores that turn away everyone’s gaze.
The object must undergo an ordeal, a trial by fire to portray the make over as truly miraculous. You don’t lose 50 pounds just by being a couch potato and taking a little yellow pill. Those pitches are reserved for the back of matchbook covers or cheap magazines buried at the bottom of the rack by the supermarket checkout counter. The audience knows you can’t get something for nothing, although enough of them figure that for a few bucks, what the heck, it’s like a lottery ticket and just maybe it will work.
But for the Real Deal . . . This requires some work. This is where “Dubya” comes in. That this self-admitted drunk who partied his way through Yale and sat out the Vietnam War doing something that is still a bit vague but definitely not heroic should be made over into a President, well now, THERE was a make over!
That we should want our presidents to be miraculous make overs is a new and alarmingly perverse twist on an old theme. We have always wanted our presidents, even when they have been rich and well-connected, to have a Horatio Alger theme in their bios. Think Abe, TR, FDR, Old Hickory. While their campaign propaganda delighted in exaggerating the story, it did not diminish its power. Lincoln did largely school himself, split rails, and ride a flatboat. FDR did almost die of polio. TR did ride up San Juan Hill.
Today we admire not the real thing but the make over. Perhaps it is because we don’t believe anything any more after two decades of muckraking JFK-like exposures of this and that celebrity. If everything is the creation of some advertising copywriter then we would at least pick the best copy. Ronald Reagan may have had a genuine Horatio Alger story of his own, but even his bio is a curious amalgam of make over and truth linked forever by his years as a GE pitch man. After him the make over became all.
As we watched Dubya, there was something contrived, stiff, almost mechanical about him, so that when he turned around we half expect to find a large windup key or radio control antenna sticking out of his neatly-pressed suit jacket. In so many moments he seemed as engineered as one of those cyborgs in a Star Trek script, only Data seems the lesser android. In a washroom somewhere on the interstate I once saw some scribble just above a bunch of names, phone numbers, and sexual wants that read, “Bush is really an android.”
That Bush should see himself as acting out a role explains many of the incidents in his Presidency, the most germane being his infamous landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit as if he had just flown a sortie himself and proclaiming “mission accomplished.”
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.
If you have forgotten, that was in 2003. Today the mission has not only not been accomplished but totally screwed up.
The press appeared to have understood this part of the Bush Presidency. One fascinating question at the press conference begins:
Mr. President, on New Orleans, you basically talked about — a moment ago about the photo opportunity.
The comment the questioner had zeroed in on was yet another strange statement Bush made in answer to a question about what mistakes he made. Here is Bush’s answer:
I’ve thought long and hard about Katrina; you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge.
So the only regret this President has about what may be the worst domestic debacle ever is that he did not give the right performance under the Klieg lights. There is no thought here about the lives lost, the surreal scenes of people waiting to be rescued, the contaminated trailers in what amounted to detention centers, only the missed photo opportunity.
Turning it Upside Down
Yet for Bush, the Klieg lights phrase suggests something more. Klieg lights also distort and in Bush’s eyes those lights are the media. I once termed this the era of the double vision because media distortion has so screwed up our sense of what is real and what is not that we have long ago ceased to be able to distinguish between the two, so we both tacitly accept what we see and at the same time cynically reject it.
Bush’s invocation of a media metaphor to describe the Presidency has that double edged quality to it. On the one hand he seems to be saying that once the lights are off the public will see his term in office for the triumph it really was, not the disaster it seems. Yet on the other hand, by acknowledging that he played to the media Bush seems to also admit the artificiality of his own role.
Think of Oliver Stone, whose movie about Bush emerges even as it subject leaves the White House. Stone has directed films about Nixon, Kennedy, 9/11, Vietnam which we know are movies–that is they aren’t true. Yet Stone deconstructs and reconstructs history to build a new reality which he insists is true, even if the facts behind it are bent or flat-out false. What is that line they used to read at the beginning of the old Dragnet television series:
Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Believing is All
The Bush line about Klieg lights also hits another aspect of his Presidency that has puzzled people and that is the apparent lack of boundary between truth and fantasy that has characterized this administration.
We still don’t really know if this administration really believed in the reasons it advanced for going to war with Iraq. The more evidence that piles up, however, the more doubts we have. At his final press conference Bush even alluded to this.
You know, not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment.
I don’t know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were — things didn’t go according to plan, let’s put it that way.
You could say the same thing about tax cuts that were supposed to stimulate the economy, not cause a recession/depression or “bailouts” for Wall Street that were supposed to resolve this crisis, but appear now to have only allowed Wall Street to continue to its unrepentant ways.
The Bush people behaved as though their script was reality and when reality deviated from the script it was reality’s fault– “things didn’t go according to plan.” And so like all good script writers they revised the script but not the version of reality behind it.
So we didn’t find WMDs, but the Iraq War was still necessary. So the tax cuts did not stimulate the economy, the crisis was the fault of those stupid people who signed on to subprime mortgages. One of Bush’s more mangled explanations describes this mindset:
And, anyway, I think historians will look back and they’ll be able to have a better look at mistakes, after some time has passed. I — one of Jake’s questions — there is no such thing as short-term history. I don’t think you can possibly get the full breadth of an administration until time has passed.
You know, where does a president’s — did a president’s decisions have the impact that he thought they would — or he thought they would, over time?
This is not merely more tortured Bush grammar; it is tortured Bush reasoning, reasoning that continues to insist his reality is the right one. This is apparent in another bizarre Bush explanation during the press conference:
I tell people that, you know, some days happy, some days not so happy; every day has been joyous.
And people, you know, they say, “I just don’t believe that to be the case.” Well, it is the case.
Even in the darkest moments of Iraq, you know, there was — and every day, when I was reading the reports about soldiers losing their lives, no question there was a lot of emotion, but also there was times where we could be lighthearted and support each other.
In that first sentence you can see him slipping in and out of script before the Klieg lights. He begins by admitting that reality, as all of us know, is made up of good days and bad days, then he pauses and says, “Every day has been joyous.”
It can’t be both, you say. Were this some patient lying on a couch in a psychiatrist’s office and you would wonder about his sanity. But this is a President for whom the script says reality has to be joyous.
This is followed by a paragraph that could have come straight from Dr. Strangelove or Charlie Chaplin cavorting with a globe in The Great Dictator. Not even Oliver Stone could top the scene Bush lays our of the White House staff being “lighthearted” in the middle of a war.
One pictures them giggling and cracking jokes as they read the latest figures on Iraq War suicides or sent a National Guard unit on its third deployment.
President vs. Presidency
In the end, the final press conference revealed George Bush as a man who profoundly misunderstood the Presidency. His Klieg lights image speaks of not merely of a Hollywood-like vision of life in the White House, but what can only be described as a boyish idea of life in the Oval Office. This is a man who saw the office as playing the role of President but not as a Presidency.
There is a marked difference between the two. In one you are an actor; in the other you are a shaper of events. In one you follow a script; in the other you write it. In one you play to the lights; in the other you play to destiny.
That George W. Bush should have so misunderstood the role of the office is especially disconcerting given that he is only the second son of a President in our history. But George W. Bush is no John Quincy Adams. In fact the entire Bush dynasty seems a perversion of the Adams family. The former focused on intellect, the latter on money. The former dedicated their lives to service; the latter dedicated their lives to power and prestige.
One has trouble envisioning what role George W. Bush will play after he leaves office. He does not have the makings of an elder statesman along the lines of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who it can be argued have contributed as much or more as ex-Presidents than they did in office. He will not retire gracefully like Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower. My guess is that he will end up being paid to play the ex-President, hired by governments and corporations who want to lend whatever they are up to some of the prestige of the White House.
One thing I do know, it will be a tough landing when the Klieg lights turn off. One can imagine Bush rubbing his eyes and squinting as he asks, “Where am I?” Meanwhile the country will wake up after eight years under Bush and realize that without the Klieg lights those years rank among the darkest in our history.
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