tb@curiouslymodest.com
Curious indeed.
He also clearly seems to think he's in full control and operating from the highest of motives. Whether those latter two judgments are correct is very hard to say from the outside, since there are some very smart, very powerful people jockeying for position underneath him and manipulating both of those features to further their own agendas.
How is this more true for the Bush administration than for the Clinton administration? Or is it just that you have a feel for how the underlings' (fellow wonks) output is delivered to Bush, but no feel for how Bush, a man who "goes with his gut", processes the input, unlike Clinton, another fellow wonk?
Interesting that you find the dynamics of the simpler man harder to understand. I am reminded of a theory Peggy Noonan wrote up in a recent column,
I have a theory that liberals and leftists prefer their leaders complicated, and conservatives prefer their leaders uncomplicated. I think the left expects a good leader to have an exotic or intricate personality or character. (A whole generation of liberal journalists grew up reading Jack Newfield and Pete Hamill on Bobby Kennedy's sense of tragedy, Murray Kempton on the bizarreness that was LBJ, and a host of books with names like "Nixon Agonistes" and "RFK at Forty," and went into journalism waiting for the complicated politicians of their era to emerge. They are, that is, pro-complication because their ambition to do great work like the great journalists of the 1960s seems to demand the presence of complicated political figures.)
Liberals like their leaders interesting. I always think this may be because some of them have not been able to fully engage the idea of a God, and tend to fill that hole in themselves with politics and its concerns. If the world of government and politics becomes your god, and yields a supergod called a president, you want that god to be interesting.
Conservatives, on the other hand, don't look for god in government, for part of being a conservative is holding the conviction that there is no god in government. They like complicated personalities in their TV shows and from actors and opera singers, but they want steadiness and a vision they can agree with from their presidents. Actually I think conservatives want their presidents the way they want their art: somewhere in the normal range. They don't like cow's heads suspended in formaldehyde and don't understand that as high art; by 1998 they thought Bill Clinton was the political version of a cow's head in formaldehyde, and they didn't like that either.
And so my liberal friends say: Why do people like Mr. Bush? And they want an interesting answer. But I do think part of the answer is: Because he's not complicated and perhaps not even especially interesting as a person. We just love that.
opinionjournal.com
I'm not sure I buy it completely, but it's interesting to think about. |
