Peggy Noonan: Testing Time for Bush
We make presidents crazy. They receive endless encomiums from friends and staff telling them of their brilliance, their courage, their foresight. "God sent you to lead us." And the authors of such statements aren't always or even usually sucking up. They mean it. They're excited, fervent, full of belief.
All a president has to do to get a standing ovation is walk into a room. He signs his name to a placard at a rally and it's treated as a historic relic--"He touched it!"
At the same time a president can routinely pick up the newspaper or log onto the Internet and find himself referred to as Hitler, Stalin or, on a good day, Satan. We call presidents fool, coward, crook; we call them reckless and feckless.
It is all so extreme. And it is, even for the hardiest personality, disorienting.
The White House itself can be a disorienting place to work. You feel at once in charge of and at the mercy of, both powerful and besieged. You can flip a switch and get every anchorman on the line, every prime minister. You have private nicknames for famous people whom you privately spoof. But a hurricane comes and you're over; a mistake is made and you're yesterday. Some midtier aide in an unimportant agency messes up, and by the time it's over a misjudgment became a scandal, a scandal became indictments, and indictments spur talk of impeachment, resignation, lame duckhood, crackup.
Faced with the you're-an-angel/you're-a-devil dichotomy, presidents tend to lean toward angel interpretations. They have to. When criticism is over the top, you take refuge in over-the-top approbation. Hubert Humphrey, veteran of presidential campaigns, liked to relax by looking at old scrapbooks containing complimentary magazine and newspaper profiles. Abe Lincoln died with a positive newspaper clipping in his wallet. They were human, intensely human beings involved in the passionate art of politics.
Which gets us to George W. Bush.
Once someone normally allied with the White House said some things that were highly critical of Mr. Bush, and the president quickly and publicly learned of them. Around this time an old friend of the president came to visit, and the president, still simmering, asked the friend what he thought of the criticism. The friend told Mr. Bush he thought the critic made some legitimate points.
Silence descended and Mr. Bush's face turned stony.
"Six months on the sh-- list?" said the friend.
"Three," said the president.
When I heard this story I laughed with delight because it had the authentic sound of Bush. If he's mad, you know. He doesn't pretend and he doesn't cover, and if anger is a flaw, well, we're all human.
George W. Bush has guts. It's the big thing his friends and supporters cherish in him. He will withstand the disapproval of the world to do what he thinks is right. He'll do it when he's wrong, too. He often has too many pots on the stove, but he can stand the heat and he will stay in the kitchen. He is an emotional man, and his emotions are readily accessible. When he becomes moved talking to soldiers and their families, he means it. He knows what men who put themselves in harm's way are, and he knows what they're owed. Other leaders know they can trust his word.
He's stubborn. The smirk is sometimes real; he can be full of himself. He's impatient and peremptory. He believes his read of a person is the read. He's funny, and occasionally merry. My favorite example is what he said to Ozzy Osbourne at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2003. Mr. Osbourne had his new hit show and was hot as a pistol. He entered the dinner as the evening's hottest guest. Cameras followed him. He stood at one point, gestured toward the dais and yelled to the president that he should grow his hair like him. "Second term, Ozzy!" Mr. Bush shot back.
Now Mr. Bush is in the first political crisis of his presidency, a crisis unusual, even perhaps unprecedented, in modern American politics, in that his own side has risen up and declared it no longer sees him as one of them. (It is comparable to what happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1990, when Conservative Party members turned on her. That rebellion was more personal than policy-based, but an old rule of politics pertains in both cases: Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.)
What should Mr. Bush do? He can follow what may be his first instinct, and his second one too, and make an even longer and more comprehensive "sh-- list." Or he can do something different, and yet in character....
Read entire article at WSJ
All a president has to do to get a standing ovation is walk into a room. He signs his name to a placard at a rally and it's treated as a historic relic--"He touched it!"
At the same time a president can routinely pick up the newspaper or log onto the Internet and find himself referred to as Hitler, Stalin or, on a good day, Satan. We call presidents fool, coward, crook; we call them reckless and feckless.
It is all so extreme. And it is, even for the hardiest personality, disorienting.
The White House itself can be a disorienting place to work. You feel at once in charge of and at the mercy of, both powerful and besieged. You can flip a switch and get every anchorman on the line, every prime minister. You have private nicknames for famous people whom you privately spoof. But a hurricane comes and you're over; a mistake is made and you're yesterday. Some midtier aide in an unimportant agency messes up, and by the time it's over a misjudgment became a scandal, a scandal became indictments, and indictments spur talk of impeachment, resignation, lame duckhood, crackup.
Faced with the you're-an-angel/you're-a-devil dichotomy, presidents tend to lean toward angel interpretations. They have to. When criticism is over the top, you take refuge in over-the-top approbation. Hubert Humphrey, veteran of presidential campaigns, liked to relax by looking at old scrapbooks containing complimentary magazine and newspaper profiles. Abe Lincoln died with a positive newspaper clipping in his wallet. They were human, intensely human beings involved in the passionate art of politics.
Which gets us to George W. Bush.
Once someone normally allied with the White House said some things that were highly critical of Mr. Bush, and the president quickly and publicly learned of them. Around this time an old friend of the president came to visit, and the president, still simmering, asked the friend what he thought of the criticism. The friend told Mr. Bush he thought the critic made some legitimate points.
Silence descended and Mr. Bush's face turned stony.
"Six months on the sh-- list?" said the friend.
"Three," said the president.
When I heard this story I laughed with delight because it had the authentic sound of Bush. If he's mad, you know. He doesn't pretend and he doesn't cover, and if anger is a flaw, well, we're all human.
George W. Bush has guts. It's the big thing his friends and supporters cherish in him. He will withstand the disapproval of the world to do what he thinks is right. He'll do it when he's wrong, too. He often has too many pots on the stove, but he can stand the heat and he will stay in the kitchen. He is an emotional man, and his emotions are readily accessible. When he becomes moved talking to soldiers and their families, he means it. He knows what men who put themselves in harm's way are, and he knows what they're owed. Other leaders know they can trust his word.
He's stubborn. The smirk is sometimes real; he can be full of himself. He's impatient and peremptory. He believes his read of a person is the read. He's funny, and occasionally merry. My favorite example is what he said to Ozzy Osbourne at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2003. Mr. Osbourne had his new hit show and was hot as a pistol. He entered the dinner as the evening's hottest guest. Cameras followed him. He stood at one point, gestured toward the dais and yelled to the president that he should grow his hair like him. "Second term, Ozzy!" Mr. Bush shot back.
Now Mr. Bush is in the first political crisis of his presidency, a crisis unusual, even perhaps unprecedented, in modern American politics, in that his own side has risen up and declared it no longer sees him as one of them. (It is comparable to what happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1990, when Conservative Party members turned on her. That rebellion was more personal than policy-based, but an old rule of politics pertains in both cases: Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.)
What should Mr. Bush do? He can follow what may be his first instinct, and his second one too, and make an even longer and more comprehensive "sh-- list." Or he can do something different, and yet in character....