It's Not Personal, Mr. Bush
By Rich Lowry
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page B01
Vladimir Putin got the "good man" treatment from George W. Bush in Slovenia two weeks ago. Bush's description of the KGB graduate was startling, but it shouldn't have been a surprise to veteran Bush watchers. Bush has repeated this routine with hundreds of supporters and colleagues: a firm handshake, a look in the eye, a jocular exchange of words and, finally, a pronouncement that whoever his interlocutor might be has a good "heart" or "soul" and is therefore a "fine American" (or, in Putin's case, a "fine Russian").
What's going on here? What we're witnessing is more than just a politician's natural bonhomie. It's a way of looking at and dealing with the world that W. has partly inherited from his father,and that partly arises from his own evangelical Christianity and his background as an ex-drinker. It places personal over philosophical considerations, and bathes them in a warm wash of religio-sentimentality.
This style of interaction can be one of Bush's foremost strengths as a politician, butit has its hazards -- as the Putin episode and the clamorous reaction to it illustrate. Bush had solid geopolitical reasons for trying toportray his meeting with the Russian as a success. But he sounded naive when he praised Putin's trustworthiness, and in the wake of the ensuing criticism from both the right and the left, made matters worse by indicating that he actually meant it: "When I looked at him, I felt like he was shooting straight with me," he told the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan.
"The personal is political" is a New-Left axiom that conservatives have always hated -- but now it seems to be animating a Republican president.
By personalizing everything, Bush's style works to obscure important differences of policy, to keep him from forthrightly confronting his political enemies, and to extend the elevation of feeling and the sentimentalization of American politics that is one of Bill Clinton's most dubious legacies. As my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru puts it, Bill Clinton decried "the politics of personal destruction"; George W. Bush wants to promote "the politics of personal affection." But a domestic political program, let alone a foreign policy, can't be run on a heartfelt embrace and a prayer, desirable as those things may be in other circumstances. In selling his agenda at home and abroad, Bush needs less heart, and more head and more will.
In one sense, W. is following in his father's footsteps just as surely as he did by attending Andover and Yale. The first President Bush relied on a tight band of supporters and aides who were united less by philosophy than by their personal characteristics -- a certain solidity and competence combined with a fierce loyalty to Bush. W.'s team may have a more conservative cast, but it has essentially the same characteristics. Which is why Dick Cheney -- the Ur-good man -- is the perfect bridge between the two Bushes.
The elder Bushalso depended on personal relationships with world leaders. He thought that for whatever reason -- greed, fear, etc. -- he could rely on them to conduct business rationally and predictably. The relationship that his son hopes to forge with Putin is firmly in this family tradition.
On the other hand, there is something radically different at play. The coloration of W.'s relationships, both with his supporters and now with Putin, is less old-line WASP and more evangelical, less Kennebunkport and more Midland, a warmer, less formal, more emotionally intimate way of dealing with the world. So, in Bush's lexicon, Putin isn't just someone with whom W. can work, he is also someone with a "good soul" (something that may not have occurred even to Putin himself and must have prompted snickers in the Kremlin's Chechnya situation room).
This style is deeply informed by Bush's religion, which accounts for his frequent references to his and other people's hearts (it is no accident that Bush's comments about Putin bore the whiff of another evangelical -- Jimmy Carter). Bush mentions "hearts" as often as John McCain refers to "special interests" and Clinton did to "the children."
"Heart" is a word that carries significant theological weight. In conservative Protestantism over the years, it has come to signify a much larger concept, what Jesus meant when he used the Greek word metanoia, denoting a great turning, a change of heart, of mind, of spirit, of everything.
That's why, during a Des Moines GOP debate, when asked who is the most important philosopher in his life, Bush said, "Christ, because he changed my heart." For many, this was the most controversial and mystifying statement that Bush made in the campaign. What did he mean by it? People in the South and the Midwest, where evangelicalism is the mainstream, connect with Bush's language immediately, but those in other parts of the country -- along with Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants -- can be left scratching their heads. As Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center says, Bush "needs to develop a public religious language accessible to other parts of the country, especially people in the Northeast."
But let's not overlook the fact that Bush's rhetoric has considerable political advantages. The religious conversion to which it's connected helps account for his personal magnanimity, his sense of his own frailties and his willingness to look beyond those of others. This is why he can be such an excellent personal politician, one characterized by his warmth and his willingness to cozy up to opponents.
This is the Bush of the humble post-election victory speech, of the moving tribute to a dying Democratic Rep. Joe Moakley, made during his first speech to Congress, of the gracious evening with members of the Kennedy family at the White House watching "Thirteen Days."
Bush's way of talking also allows him to tap into a powerful current in the nation's secular culture. Evangelical Protestantism -- especially the Pentecostal strain of it, so finely depicted in the 1997 movie "The Apostle" -- has a strong element of emotionalism, with its emphasis on a passionate embrace of God. The sentimentality of secular culture gives this aspect of evangelicalism crossover appeal.
So, Bush, for instance, was able to kiss and mist his way to a winning performance on "Oprah" during the campaign. He told an appreciative audience that he needs forgiveness "when my heart turns dark," that he believes in God "with all my heart." This private theological language worked because it could easily have been mistaken for the gooey argot of daytime TV.
Bush also talked -- as he has in other interviews -- about his triumph over alcohol, which was for him an intensely religious experience, but which for many of his secular listeners recalls the language of ever-burgeoning 12-step programs. Bush's conversion experience informs not just his rhetoric but his policy, especially his faith-based initiative, which his aides repeatedly say is the program that is most important to him.
"Society is changed one heart, one soul at a time," Bush said last year during a visit to a religious program for drug-addicted fathers. In his view, government welfare programs shouldn't address "structural poverty" or any of the grand social problems that prompted the Great Society, but should help make possible personal redemption. There is much to be said for this approach: It cuts right to the underlying problem of America's social breakdown.
But the personal has its limits, especially when its fuzziness prevents Bush from making a clear political case.
During the John Ashcroft confirmation battle, for instance, Bush said senators should look at "Sen. Ashcroft's heart and his record." Before secretary of labor nominee Linda Chavez dropped out of the running for that post, Bush said he wanted to shine a "light on her big heart." In recommending the hearts of his nominees, Bush was making unverifiable and essentially meaningless claims for them (how exactly was Pat Leahy, the leading Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, supposed to examine Ashcroft's heart?).
Bush, oddly enough, is bringing an essentially Clintonian assumption to the Washington debate. During impeachment, Clinton portrayed the entire controversy as unnecessary, just the product of a personal vendetta against him, as if there weren't important public questions to be decided. Bush has vindicated this judgment by repeatedly characterizing the Gingrich-Clinton battles as meaningless squabbles and any subsequent partisan fights in Washington as regrettable breaches in good manners.
Bush is playing, like Clinton, to a public impatience with political argument -- with confrontation, with intellectual distinctions, with judgment itself. This attitude holds considerable danger for Bush should it drive his actions and not just his words. It's no accident that on the issue where Bush has so far been at his nicknaming, can't-we-all-get-along bipartisan best -- education -- the final legislative product will be far from what he wanted.
Bonhomie has its uses, especially when it comes to burnishing Bush's image, but a political program can't be passed on personal goodwill alone. Vladimir Putin is bent on frustrating U.S. missile defense plans. Majority Leader Tom Daschle wants his party to hold onto the Senate in 2002 and to defeat the Bush program. Democrats want to evict W. from the White House. All of them will be tamed only through determined, tough-minded public advocacy.
Their hearts are beside the point.
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
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