Michael Currie Schaffer: George W. Bush claims the mantle of Teddy Roosevelt
[Michael Currie Schaffer is a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer. ]
"T.R.? He's No T.R." Thus, in last Sunday's New York Times, began the latest round of mockery about one of President Bush's increasingly far-fetched historical comparisons. The editorial excoriated the environmental record of the wilderness-drilling, Halliburton-coddling second Bush, who, the paper argued, was no match for the wildlife-loving, trust-busting first Roosevelt.
The pattern, by now, is quite familiar. Over the bleak course of George W. Bush's second term, his loyalists have found themselves grasping for increasingly dubious role models for the embattled president--and then being roundly derided for their efforts. In the eyes of his dwindling band of admirers, Bush has been Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and, most frequently, Theodore Roosevelt. Naturally, each comparison has had its own grain of truth: Like Truman and Lincoln, he has been sharply criticized for his handling of a war; like Reagan, he has been repeatedly underestimated by pointy-headed foes; like T.R., he cast off the manners of his eastern elitist upbringing and embraced a macho western persona. Also, all four lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, were male, and enjoyed diets that included proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
Alas, such similarities have done little to mollify critics. Every time the administration cites some new presidential parallel, scholars are duly called forward to pick it apart. Bush "lacks any successes of comparable magnitude to compensate for his mismanagement of the Iraq war," historian James Hershberg told The Washington Post in a story where he noted that at least Truman, for all his second-term unpopularity, presided over some notable accomplishments. "George W. Bush is Lincoln the way Dan Quayle is Jack Kennedy," the University of Oregon's Garrett Epps concluded in Salon following a speech in which Bush likened himself to the Great Emancipator. Bush's claims to the Reagan mantle have spawned an entire cottage industry of conservative denunciations--the most celebrated of which may be Bruce Bartlett's Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
What such nit-picking ignores, though, is that Bush's presidential role models, like most great men, led lives that involved significant personal evolution. True, Bush may not seem much like the down-to-earth Truman of the White House, but his knife-wielding political team might have felt very at home with the Kansas City machine pol Truman of two decades earlier. His standard stump speeches, with their appeals to fear and their hints of sedition, might be a far cry from the sunny Reagan rhetoric of popular memory, but what about the foreboding Gipper that once took to the lecture circuit in support of Barry Goldwater? Bush's problem, it seems, isn't that he's entirely different from our secular saints. Rather, it's that he resembles the wrong parts of their biographies....
[The writer goes on to note similarities between Bush and TR's latter years.]
Read entire article at New Republic
"T.R.? He's No T.R." Thus, in last Sunday's New York Times, began the latest round of mockery about one of President Bush's increasingly far-fetched historical comparisons. The editorial excoriated the environmental record of the wilderness-drilling, Halliburton-coddling second Bush, who, the paper argued, was no match for the wildlife-loving, trust-busting first Roosevelt.
The pattern, by now, is quite familiar. Over the bleak course of George W. Bush's second term, his loyalists have found themselves grasping for increasingly dubious role models for the embattled president--and then being roundly derided for their efforts. In the eyes of his dwindling band of admirers, Bush has been Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and, most frequently, Theodore Roosevelt. Naturally, each comparison has had its own grain of truth: Like Truman and Lincoln, he has been sharply criticized for his handling of a war; like Reagan, he has been repeatedly underestimated by pointy-headed foes; like T.R., he cast off the manners of his eastern elitist upbringing and embraced a macho western persona. Also, all four lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, were male, and enjoyed diets that included proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
Alas, such similarities have done little to mollify critics. Every time the administration cites some new presidential parallel, scholars are duly called forward to pick it apart. Bush "lacks any successes of comparable magnitude to compensate for his mismanagement of the Iraq war," historian James Hershberg told The Washington Post in a story where he noted that at least Truman, for all his second-term unpopularity, presided over some notable accomplishments. "George W. Bush is Lincoln the way Dan Quayle is Jack Kennedy," the University of Oregon's Garrett Epps concluded in Salon following a speech in which Bush likened himself to the Great Emancipator. Bush's claims to the Reagan mantle have spawned an entire cottage industry of conservative denunciations--the most celebrated of which may be Bruce Bartlett's Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
What such nit-picking ignores, though, is that Bush's presidential role models, like most great men, led lives that involved significant personal evolution. True, Bush may not seem much like the down-to-earth Truman of the White House, but his knife-wielding political team might have felt very at home with the Kansas City machine pol Truman of two decades earlier. His standard stump speeches, with their appeals to fear and their hints of sedition, might be a far cry from the sunny Reagan rhetoric of popular memory, but what about the foreboding Gipper that once took to the lecture circuit in support of Barry Goldwater? Bush's problem, it seems, isn't that he's entirely different from our secular saints. Rather, it's that he resembles the wrong parts of their biographies....
[The writer goes on to note similarities between Bush and TR's latter years.]