Bush is surviving media onslaught
Terence Corcoran
Financial Post
Saturday, October 30, 2004
The Economist's editorial writers, "with a heavy heart," yesterday endorsed John Kerry. The Financial Times of London urged Americans to "burst the Bush bubble" earlier in the week. The New Yorker magazine backs Kerry. The major liberal magazines -- The Atlantic, Harper's -- have been waging war on Bush for a year. The New York Times, in editorials and seemingly in news coverage, works to get Bush out of the White House. Vanity Fair is anti-Bush. The Globe and Mail threw its support to Kerry.
Nobody quite went as far as Charlie Brooker, a columnist with The Guardian in London. "On Nov. 2," wrote Mr. Brooker last weekend, "the entire civilized world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. -- where are you now that we need you?"
The Guardian issued a retraction, claiming the assassination suggestion was intended as humour, although to be fair to Mr. Brooker, his sentiments didn't seem too far off the mainstream of national and international commentary and opinion. The global crusade to force George W. Bush out of office on Nov. 2 amounts to the most comprehensive mass-media election-year campaign in modern history.
The full force of the anti-Bush movement hit me the other day at the World's Biggest Bookstore, a Chapters-Indigo operation in downtown Toronto. On two tables near the main entrance, piles of books were mounted under a sign that said: "Bush, Love Him or Hate Him." Whoever thought up this idea forgot to order the titles that would fit the Love Him side of the Bush dichotomy.
Of more than 30 books on Bush, about 30 were in the Hate Bush category, leaving browsers with the choice of deciding how much anti-Bush vitriol they want to take home with them. For hard-core Bush haters, there are such titles as: The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception, by David Corn; The Bush Haters' Handbook: An A-Z Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years, by Jack Humberman; Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, by Molly Ivins; and Bush Must Go: The Top Ten Reasons Why George Bush Doesn't Deserve a Second Term, by Bill Press.
More sophisticated (but no less condemning) are the smooth critiques of Maureen Dowd in Enter at Your Own Risk and Graydon Carter in What We've Lost: America Under the Bush Administration. There's also Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh and American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips. For personal smears, nothing beats The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, by Kitty Kelley.
More policy-oriented attacks on Bush include Imperial America: The Bush Assault On World Order, by John Newhouse; House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties, by Craig Unger; The Bush Betrayal, by James Bovard; The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green; and The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush, by Peter Singer.
The book version of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is accompanied by another Moore contribution titled Will They Ever Trust Us Again? Letters from the War Zone. Other titles include Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order, by Mark Crispin Miller; The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex, by Helen Caldicott; Mission Not Accomplished: How George Bush Lost the War on Terrorism, by William H. Turner. There's more, including a Brookings Institution effort, Imperial America: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, by Council on Foreign Relations scholars Ivo J. Daalder and James M. Lindsay.
The only pro-Bush contributions at the World's Biggest Bookstore were David Frum's The Right Man and A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush, by Ronald Kessler, who paints a glowing portrait of Bush's honesty, integrity and clarity of purpose. Not one book on Kerry was visible in the display area around the Bush tables.
If books and editorials are stacked up against Bush in unprecedented volumes, how come the polls still have Bush and Kerry neck and neck? Is Bush still holding on to support despite the sweep of national and international condemnation -- or because of it? There's no answer to these questions, although The Economist's editorial yesterday perhaps contains a clue to explain why Bush appears to be surviving the greatest mass-media attack on a president in history.
The editorial waffles on entry, declaring Bush and Kerry to be "two deeply flawed men." The case against Bush, however, is mostly based on the conclusion that the Bush administration has made a number of mistakes, including creating the Guantanamo Bay prison camp that deprives inmates of basic rights. This is Bush's "biggest mistake," says The Economist. If Guantanamo is the worst of Bush's sins, is it worth throwing him out of office?
Apparently, because the bulk of The Economist's editorial is convolutedly devoted to criticizing Bush for failing to fight Iraq more forcefully. "Invading Iraq was not a mistake," it says. But changing the regime "so incompetently" in Iraq was a "huge mistake." It was a huge mistake because the U.S. "had far too few soldiers to provide security" in Iraq. The editorial goes on to say that "America still has too few troops" in Iraq.
Would Kerry reverse the mistakes in Iraq? The Economist doubts he will, although they say he must. A Kerry administration will "need to make a success of the rebuilding of Iraq, as the key part of a broader effort to stabilize, modernize and, yes, democratize the Middle East." What The Economist seems to want is a new president, John Kerry, who will carry out the foreign policy objectives of George W. Bush better than George W. Bush.
If that's part of the message of the media attack on Bush, maybe that's why Bush is still as high in the polls as he is. And it may be the reason he could win.
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