Bill Keller's Cover story in the "Times" magazine is guaranteed to ruin your Sunday Morning cup of Coffee, John. Well written, with good insights. Mandatory reading for the rest of us. Hey, it's in the NYT! "Nuff said" :>)
January 26, 2003
Reagan's Son
By BILL KELLER
In December, George W. Bush had one of those turbulent spells that can cause a president nightmares about tumbling over the falls in a barrel. First he purged his economic team, the kind of housecleaning that tends to be taken as an admission of failed policies. He ordered a North Korean freighter arrested at sea, on the way to Yemen with a suspicious cargo of missiles, then sheepishly let it go on its way -- an amateurish misstep in his war on terror. The man he proudly put forth to head an investigation of America's vulnerability to terrorists abruptly declined the job because it would interfere with his consulting business. The party's leader in the newly recaptured Senate blundered into a career-ending display of insensitivity that peeled open the party's history of race-baiting.
And the impact of these seeming embarrassments on President George W. Bush was? Scarcely a nick. No outbreak of articles postulating a White House in disarray. No mutters of discord in his ranks. On the contrary, he (or at least his political judo master, Karl Rove) was hailed for his genius in helping maneuver a presidential favorite into the Senate leadership. Bush's approval ratings held firm and high. Nothing stuck. Any more than a year of corporate scandals, some involving White House friends, had stuck. Any more than the recurring reminders of Al Qaeda's unimpeded reach -- in Bali, in Kenya -- had stuck.
Bush's seeming invincibility to bad news may be exasperating to Democrats, but it was no surprise to Michael Deaver, the shrewd public relations man who played Karl Rove to an earlier president, Ronald Reagan. When Deaver was handling spin for Reagan, one frustrated Democrat described the scandal-proof chief executive as the Teflon President. This time around, Deaver watched the White House twirl and sidestep through the serial crises of December with deep professional admiration. To Deaver there was nothing mysterious about it, no Teflon. It was just the relentless discipline of a president who consistently defies the expectations of people who think they are smarter than he is.
Like a lot of Republicans who have watched both Reagan and Bush at close hand, Deaver sees uncanny similarities between them. The presidents are alike in their outlooks and career paths, in their agendas of tax-cutting and confrontational deployment of American power, in the ideological mix of their advisers. (Whatever you read about the president's inheritance from his father and Gerald Ford, the Reagan DNA is dominant in the staffing, training and planning of the Bush administration.) More than that, there are important similarities of character and temperament. And both are simple men who have made a political virtue of being -- in Bush's word -- ''misunderestimated'' by the political elite.
That Bush is Reaganesque is a conceit that some conservatives have wishfully, tentatively embraced since he emerged as a candidate, and one that Bush himself has encouraged. The party faithful have been pining for a new Reagan since Reagan, and for Bush the analogy has the added virtue of providing an alternative political lineage; he's not Daddy's Boy, he's Reagan Jr. The comparison has only gained currency since Bush entered the White House. Some Republicans speak of the current era, with the culmination of Reagan's ballistic missile defense and the continuing assault on marginal tax rates and, especially, the standing tall against global evil as the recommencing of the Reagan ''revolution.''
''I think he's the most Reagan-like politician we have seen, certainly in the White House,'' Deaver said. ''I mean, his father was supposed to be the third term of the Reagan presidency -- but then he wasn't. This guy is.''
Reagan's devout do not all buy this analogy. Some wonder about the depth of Bush's commitment to their causes. Others fear the comparison might diminish their hero, now living out his days in an Alzheimer's oblivion. Peggy Noonan, Reagan's gifted speechwriter and a torchbearer for his memory, has portrayed Bush in one of her books as eager to be likened to Reagan, but she insists that the two men are incomparable. Bush, she says, represents ''the triumph of the average American man.'' He is, she told me, ''like a successful local businessman in the boring local business who becomes a school board president.'' (She meant that in a good way.) Reagan, on the other hand, was ''hardly your basic man on the street.''
Many students of the presidency would argue that a basic-man-on-the-street quality -- a plain-spoken, unassuming genuineness -- is central to the appeal of both men, but Noonan's wariness is understandable. Let's concede that this kind of comparison can be reductionist. At its silliest, it can lapse into a parlor game of the Lincoln-had-a-secretary-named-Kennedy variety. Times change. Presidents reflect their times.
But midway into Bush's first term, measuring the emerging president against Reagan is an instructive way of looking at Bush's qualities and of explaining his popularity. It is even, with a larger margin of error, a basis for hazarding some guesses about the course he will follow, particularly now that his hand is strengthened by a Congress of his own party, by the unlikelihood of internal opposition in 2004 and for that matter by the lack of coherent opposition from the Democrats.
I began this exercise inclined to think of Bush as Reagan Lite -- that is, a president with shallower, unschooled instincts in place of the older man's studied, lifelong convictions, and without the mastery of language that served Reagan so well. Perhaps, I'd have said, he is a bit of a Reagan poseur -- the White House being such a studio of contrivance and calculation. I ended my research more inclined to think that Bush is in a sense the fruition of Reagan, and that -- far from being the lightweight opportunist of liberal caricature or the centrist he sometimes played during his own election campaign -- he stands a good chance of advancing a radical agenda that Reagan himself could only carry so far. Bush is not, as Reagan was, an original, but he has adapted Reagan's ideas to new times, and found some new language in which to market them. We seem not only to be witnessing the third term of the Reagan presidency; at this rate we may well see the fourth.
They are westerners (Midland, Tex., is truly the West, not the South), with a fondness for the region's open spaces and don't-fence-me-in rhetoric. Karl Rove contends that this is one reason that Reagan and Bush have been underrated by the media elite, whose prejudices are still manufactured mainly in the East. As president, Reagan was happiest clearing brush on his mountaintop ranch in California, and Bush loves chain-sawing cedar on his expanse of Texas prairie. Bush is a latecomer to this lifestyle, having acquired his ranch while a presidential candidate, and he is more self-conscious about it. (Reagan disappeared to his ranch and called it vacation; Bush calls his the Western White House and makes it a showcase of his authenticity.) Like Reagan, Bush takes great pains to run his ranch on ecologically sound principles, even as he dismantles environmental regulation. In the West, that is not considered hypocrisy but virtuous self-interest.
Defying the advice of the experts, they launched seemingly hopeless campaigns against popular incumbent governors and astonished their own party by winning. Each went on to win a second term by large margins. Reagan's executive experience was more meaningful. (California has a strong-governor system, while in Texas the governor defers to rambunctious, independently appointed agency heads.) Both managed to work with Democratic legislatures, which often entailed ruthlessness in California but in Texas required mainly charm.
They are the least introspective of presidents, but unashamedly spiritual, professing a personal faith that goes well beyond churchgoing. Bush bonded with Vladimir Putin over the Russian's story of a lost crucifix and opens cabinet meetings with a prayer. Reagan would sometimes astonish visitors by talking about Armageddon in a way that did not seem to be merely allegorical. Both attracted evangelical voters with their born-again vernacular. More than other presidents of recent times, they imbued their civil rhetoric with evangelical themes and suggested that America has a divine assignment in the world to spread what Reagan called ''the sacred fire of human liberty.''
Bush, like Reagan, is a man of self-discipline, punctual, diet-conscious, religious about his gym time and a good night's sleep, devoted to simple, mind-clearing outdoor exertion, impatient when meetings dawdle. Perhaps Bush, a reformed binge drinker, and Reagan, the son of an alcoholic, each learned to view rigorous routine as a safeguard against chaos.
Reagan and Bush are known as devoted homebodies. Laura Bush is not the assertive, hyperprotective West Wing enforcer Nancy Reagan was, although Karen Hughes played something close to that role for Bush. Bush is more gregarious than Reagan, but they are loners, in the sense that they are perfectly at ease without company. Both men are often described as comfortable in their own skins.
Ideologically they are to the right of the popular median strip. Reagan's principles were developed over decades and fortified by a selective but extensive reading of history. Bush's seem more instinctive. This makes him less predictable. Where Reagan's creed was a catechism of ideas reinforced by anecdotes, Bush's is a more earthbound compound of experience and politics. His relevant schooling includes a dozen years studying the campaigns and presidencies of Reagan and his father, and a largely unsuccessful but self-defining career in oil development, a big-bets industry that mythologizes risk.
''Bush's views are honed more by experience than by information,'' said a Republican strategist. ''For Bush, cutting taxes is not a philosophy. It's the result of spending much of his life immersed in a milieu with people who groused that taxes stifle investment and innovation.''
Reagan, who became president just before his 70th birthday, arrived at the Oval Office pretty much a finished product. Bush is still more of a work in progress. But they seem to share a palate of beliefs that mix Christian moralism, American nationalism, laissez-faire economics laced with a heavy dose of supply-side theory and a general mistrust of federal government as inefficient and unaccountable.
Each spent his first wad of political capital pushing a large tax cut -- even as oceans of red ink rose around him. Reagan's first tax bill was more sweeping, but as the details of Bush's next budget make clear, he's nowhere near finished. Each man talked about tax cuts as a way to unleash private energy and, secondarily, as a way to starve oppressive government.
Martin Anderson, who was Reagan's domestic policy chief, helped organize policy tutorials for Bush during the campaign, and says he often felt he was watching a new incarnation of Reagan. ''On taxes, on education, it was the same. On Social Security, Bush's position was exactly what Reagan always wanted and talked about in the 70's,'' he said. ''I just can't think of any major policy issue on which Bush was different.''
Bush talks, as Reagan did, about a world of black and white, and tends to measure his counterparts in politics and world affairs by a moral standard. Diplomacy was personal for Reagan; once he recognized Mikhail Gorbachev as a genuine reformer, he left behind his most doctrinaire anti-Communist advisers in his willingness to do business with the Soviet Union. Bush is like that, too.
Each man had a trauma early in his presidency, a violent epiphany, that won him an outpouring of popular support and confirmed in him a sense of destiny. For Reagan, it was being shot, almost fatally, outside the Washington Hilton just two months after his inauguration. For Bush, of course, it was Sept. 11.
Both men are optimists -- an appealing quality in politicians, since a prerequisite for setting out to make things better is a faith that they can become better. The optimism is more guarded in Bush than it was in Reagan, who was our sunniest modern president.
And perhaps the most important similarity of all: each man will be remembered as a risk-taker. They each have an impulse for the audacious. Bush has consistently pressed for more aggressive options in the war on terror -- not sending a cruise missile at an empty tent, but declaring war on all terrorist groups with global reach and states that harbor them, authorizing a war in Afghanistan based on untested new tactics and technology. Now he seems bent on a war with Iraq and a game of diplomatic chicken with North Korea.
''Reagan and this Bush both have that presidential temperament,'' said Lou Cannon, who has written four Reagan biographies and is at work on his fifth. ''They don't commit themselves quickly, but when they do they don't second-guess themselves. They're willing to take the main chance.''
[T] here is a classic ''Saturday Night Live'' Reagan skit in which, as soon as the cameras are gone and the Oval Office door is closed, the amiable chucklehead becomes a slightly sinister strategic mastermind. It was hilarious precisely because we all believed in the genial dimwit. Even now, even after he has taken the country to war, it is possible to imagine the same skit featuring George W. Bush. Both of these presidents inspired, and to some extent still inspire, a frisson of disbelief: how did this guy get to be president of the mightiest nation on earth?
Standing Bush and Reagan side by side is interesting not least because of the way both men have been taken so lightly by the pundits and scholars and political savants and late-night humorists who so often set the tone of political discourse. Their presidential gaffes have been compiled in amusing paperbacks sold at bookstore checkout counters. They have been mocked for their inability to master detail, for their devotion to facts that are not facts, for their seeming lack of intellectual heft. In the European press especially, both started off as cowboys and buffoons.
Reagan was dreamy, prone to confuse movies with real life, capable of forgetting the names of his cabinet members; Bush is inarticulate, likely to lose his place midthought and inclined to lowbrow bluster. The conservative columnist Robert Novak has said that Bush has ''the smallest vocabulary of any president I've ever seen.'' David Frum, a conservative who worked as a Bush speechwriter, has written that ''conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House.''
Both presidents, schooled in the discipline of message, can sound to those who listen for a living as if they have been programmed by some attending Svengali.
''This business of saying the same thing over and over and over again -- which to a lot of Washington insiders and pundits is boring -- works,'' Deaver said. ''That was sort of what we figured out in the Reagan White House. And I think these people do it very, very well.''
It is not just highbrow condescension. Although Reagan won handily in 1980, many voters were uneasy about his bellicose rhetoric and his novelty economics, along with his Hollywood credentials. Twenty years later the exit polls found that 42 percent of voters felt Bush was incapable of handling a world crisis and that 44 percent felt he did not ''know enough'' to handle the presidency. Of those who voted for Bush, 51 percent said they had reservations about their vote.
These numbers have pretty much been erased since Sept. 11, but some conservatives still worry that Bush, like Reagan, will be diminished in the first draft of history because he is held to be a lightweight by the kind of people who write those first drafts.
David Frum has just published an admiring insider book about the Bush presidency -- jumping in early, he told me, because he feared that Bush's legacy would be hijacked by liberal critics if conservatives did not stake their claim early.
As it happens, Reagan has been enjoying an intellectual rehabilitation. The publication in 2001 of Reagan's original, handwritten scripts for the radio homilies he delivered caused many skeptics to concede that he was a better writer and thinker than most had generally imagined. Martin Anderson, who edited the volume and who presides over something of a Reagan industry at the Hoover Institution, is at work on a follow-up volume of Reagan's private letters. Noonan's book exalting the Reagan presidency as the triumph of character was a best seller last year. The History Channel ran a gauzy tribute in November.
Not all of the Reagan revisionism has been so kind, though. Frances FitzGerald, focusing on the Reagan ballistic missile defense scheme in her absorbing 2000 book, ''Way Out There in the Blue,'' detected a large measure of political opportunism behind the idealistic visionary. (She also deflated the myth that Star Wars did in Soviet Communism.) But interest in Reagan runs high, and the trend in appraisals is favorable.
Notwithstanding occasional cloudbursts of scorn from the great Eastern liberal conspiracy, the establishment view of Bush has also moved significantly. We have already gone in two years from the affable campaign doofus portrayed in Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary and Frank Bruni's election memoir, ''Ambling Into History,'' to the incisive, decisive chief executive of Bob Woodward's war-room reconstruction, ''Bush at War.'' That transformation cannot be entirely written off as a masterful spin job, nor entirely attributed to a presidential growth spurt following the grave challenge of the terror attacks. There is something there, some pre-existing quality, that avid Bush critics have missed.
One of the biggest mistakes people have made about Bush is to look at all the seasoned pros he hired and take that as a sign of weakness. Much Washington punditry still insinuates that Dick Cheney is the presidential ventriloquist, that Rove is the political mastermind -- and that Bush is in over his head. This seems to me wrongheaded. In most of the world an executive who surrounds himself with highly competent advisers is regarded as admirably self-confident.
Lou Cannon points out that both Reagan and Bush picked vice presidents (George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney, respectively) with resumes far more impressive than their own. Contrast that to Nixon's choice of Spiro Agnew or Bush Sr.'s of Dan Quayle -- gravitas-free running mates seemingly intended not to overshadow the president.
Speaking of Reagan and the younger Bush, Cannon told me, ''They don't have a huge ego, and that enables you to get really strong people around you. Reagan never took umbrage, when I was covering him, if Jim Baker got credit for something, or George Shultz. It never bothered him a bit. Bush has that. If Cheney or Rumsfeld gets credit, that's fine with him.''
The White House is, to be sure, protective, intolerant of public dissent, cautious about putting the gaffe-prone president into situations (like regular press conferences) where he might embarrass himself. But Bush has shown a willingness to overrule his better-credentialed aides on important matters, including Cheney on the decision to take Iraq to the United Nations.
''You can't watch Bush and Cheney together for half a minute and feel any doubt about who is the trusted adviser and who is the president,'' says Frum, who was himself initially unimpressed by Bush.
As for the idea that Bush is lazy, incurious or just not very bright, his supporters argue that critics have tended to judge the president by standards that are superficial or misleading. Bush is not, like Bill Clinton, a polymath who can dazzle you with his mastery of detail, who can speak for hours without notes, who can argue an issue from a dozen sides. He is, they say, adept at focusing an issue, asking the pertinent questions, relegating distractions to the sidelines, driving on to a decision and sticking to it.
Compare the disciplined Bush of ''Bush at War'' with the Bill Clinton of another recent insider book, Kenneth Pollack's ''Threatening Storm.'' That book, a case for going to war against Iraq, portrays the Clinton administration (in which Pollack served) prolonging the discussions while recoiling from the big decisions, equivocating, shifting ground, always looking to keep options open.
''Good advice doesn't come in a box marked 'good advice,' '' Frum says. ''No president can know all he needs to know. What you want, above all, is somebody who's got the ability to recognize good choices when they are presented to him.''
[O] n wednesday mornings, the Washington foot soldiers of the right -- the gun rights people, the anti-abortion groups, the privatize-everything lobby, the tax-cut enthusiasts -- meet to talk strategy at the office of Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. The active political right can be roughly divided into conservatives and revolutionaries -- those who are governed by a sense of caution and pragmatism, whether the issue is sustaining the economy or keeping the world safe for American interests, and those who have a fervor to change the fundamentals and are willing to break some eggs to do it. The Norquist meeting is omelet central.
Those, like Norquist, who have been around through periods of frustration and irrelevance have not felt so pumped since the heady and short-lived House rule of Newt Gingrich -- and that was the passion of opposition. Now the White House sends emissaries to their meetings and treats them as allies. They sense that this is Reagan redux, and while some wonder -- as ideologues often wonder when in the company of politicians -- if they are being used, Norquist assures them that in Bush they have a serviceable marriage of political expedience and radical agenda.
Norquist has been a field marshal and a kind of political id for Reagan and Gingrich. He is convinced that Bush, unlike his father, both buys the basic rightist, leave-us-alone agenda on principle and believes that, properly articulated, it is the route to sustained political gain for his party. ''Bush 41 didn't learn from Reagan,'' Norquist told me. ''His whole view of what was doable was determined pre-Reagan. George W. is a post-Reagan president. He came of age watching Reagan succeed and his father fail. With Bush, this stuff is visceral.''
Under the first President Bush, of course, the pragmatists were clearly in charge. Under Reagan -- and again now -- the play-it-safers and the boat-rockers coexist in a state of tension, an energetic, charged equilibrium.
This is most obvious in the area where least was expected of Bush: his engagement of the world. Bush has been willing to throw overboard reams of established foreign-policy doctrine in his enthusiastic assumption of the role of solo superpower, scrapping the ABM treaty, scheduling the first deployment of antimissile batteries and enshrining ''pre-emption'' as the American military doctrine. In Reagan's administrations, scorn for treaties and international organizations as an encumbrance on American power was rife, but not dominant. It is the default position in the Bush White House.
Reagan had within his administrations a coterie of moralists, mostly in the second and third tier, who advocated an interventionist role for America. Bush, of course, does, too. They are, many of them, the same people: Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon (and Richard Perle in an advisory role), Richard Armitage and John Bolton at the State Department, U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council and others.
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