BUSH: A REAGAN DOLL WITH BOBBING HEAD
By Richard Reeves
Syndicated Columnist
October 4, 2002
WASHINGTON -- My mail, like that of many members of Congress, has turned heavily against President Bush and his marching as to war in Iraq. That, I suppose, is to be expected because war fever is rising so quickly, epecially here in the war capital, that the idea that the man in the White House really means it is only now sinking in, in the calmer precincts of the United States.
Mostly I get questions, and the most common one is how can this be happening without the rest of us having any say? My answers to those letters focus on the rise in presidential war-making powers that has resulted from the end of the draft and advances in the technology of battle. We have a volunteer military now, which means a professional military, and we have the capacity to inflict great damage from great distances with very little risk to our well-trained and well-equipped forces.
This would not be happening if we still had a draft and the president had to go to the parents of America and ask for their children. Our kind of mass destruction takes only the few and the brave, with reserve forces used for non-combat transportation and supply services. So who's to complain about an attack?
Not the Congress, which is even more influenced by flag-waving than the general public. Members of the House and Senate see themselves most at risk -- politically, not literally -- in this kind of warfare, so they gravitate to the safety of voting with the president, because he has more information. Right? Maybe he does. But he is not sharing it with the legislative branch, and that is just fine with most legislators. They can use ignorance as their escape hatch if things go badly.
So what is on the president's mind? A question from Don Limbaugh in Portland, Ore., caught my attention:
"Where does the Bush administration square up in terms of 'dangerousness'?" Is he Reagan dangerous? Is he McCarthyism dangerous? Is he Hitler dangerous?"
My answer would be Reagan. This George Bush strikes me as a miniature Ronald Reagan, a head-bobbing doll in the back window, working from the Gipper's old playbook. On domestic politics, his timing and moves on the tax cut last year were almost exactly the same as Reagan's in 1981. On foreign policy, which Bush seems to think is military policy, Reagan knew a great deal more than Bush does, and the 40th president (and the American people of the early 1980s) knew a great deal more about the real nature and threat of totalitarian communism than any of us understand of the perils of this day.
I have spent a lot of time, intellectually, with Ronald Reagan for the past year and more in researching a book on his presidency. I disagreed, then and now, with much of what he believed and did, but he understood America, and he knew most of what he needed to know and understand about its enemies. Reagan loyalists, many of them now serving Bush, exaggerate his role and achievements in the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, but Ronald Reagan did have a personal sense of history.
I doubt that Reagan, if he were still well, would make grand claims about winning wars and changing history. I think he would say now what he thought then, sometimes in a simplistic way: that the American system was infinitely stronger than the Soviet system, and that the decline of communism was only a matter of timing. What the "Great Communicator" communicated so effectively was a condensed, homogenized and popular sense of where Americans had been and where he wanted to take them next.
More than I thought at the time, Reagan was a patient man who did know what he was trying to do. He had a sense of American strength and the opposition's weaknesses. He knew that if America prevailed, it would be by example, not by conquest and occupation.
Besides, Reagan was a lucky guy. I don't see any sense of history in George Bush, so I can just hope he has some of the Gipper's luck.
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CORRECTION: In a recent column I incorrectly said that Sen. Tom Daschle was not a veteran. In fact, he served three years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force. I regret the error.
COPYRIGHT 2002 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
Originally Published on October-04-2002
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