Remember the Bush vacation?
Last year. August. The
“family ranch” in rural Crawford, Tex. The Presidential-esque seal behind the
press secretary’s platform, “WESTERN WHITE HOUSE” branded across the bottom;
the Rancher in Chief snipping at reporters wondering why the man who promised
to bring a new dignity to Washington was abandoning the capital for a solid
month after hardly half a year in office, saying that “they don’t understand
the definition of work … I’m getting a lot of work done.” (The more friendly
among the media helped White House Presidential Counsel Karen Hughes revive a
Reagan-era phrase: the “working vacation.”)
We wise citizens of the Republic of Media reveled in the sheer
histrionics of it all. The New Republic
reported that George W. bought this “family” homestead way back in 1997-the
property developed alongside the younger Bush’s Presidential ambitions,
completed just in time to serve as stage-set for his 2000 campaign video. His
August 2001 command performance there did not disappoint. Ryan Liz of TNR recorded the Great Man’s chatter
upon arrival: “It’s nice to be home…. This is my home…. It’s good to be
home…. This is where you come home… I like my own home”-Texas being a
place, he assured his interlocutors, where “a neighbor means more than just
somebody living next-door to somebody else.” Mr. Bush’s nearest neighbor in
Crawford, it turned out, was several miles away. New Yorkers made many jokes
about George W. Bush-less a cowboy than the handpicked favorite of Wall Street
Republicans-during his weeks in Texas. As once was their wont.
But if George W. Bush, home on the range, was to many New Yorkers
hilarious, his lingering sojourn in Texas also felt devious: proof positive
that our President would play to the rubes a thousand times before even
deigning to set foot in the nation’s largest city. It was a symbolic moment in
the souring of a political relationship that was never too sugary to begin
with. He hated us; everyone knew
that. Even the gnarliest stereotype of the right-wing outer-borough hard-hat
couldn’t have been too pleased with the guy.
Then, the apocalypse. Hardly had the first vigil for Sept. 11 hit
the pavement when Mr. Bush showed up at Ground Zero-there had been some
complaining that he hadn’t made a first-day Churchillian walk-through-and
mounted those wasted ramparts with that scratchy megaphone in his right hand
and a retired old fireman at his right. “We can’t hear you,” brayed a bystander
as his speech began; “I can hear you !”
he brayed back. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked
these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
“Bush! Bush! Bush!” the New York crowd chanted then; and many are
still prepared to chant it now.
It was as if he had turned his back on his Texas fetish and made
room in his heart for us. George W. Bush had a last laugh of sorts vis-à-vis the snarky Manhattan types,
were anyone inclined to laugh: Not only did this city-perhaps even its
liberals-join the rest of the nation in branding this man a hero; now even his
staged histrionics have been adjudged the mark of a wise and brave statesman.
Since Sept. 11, New York has been loving George W. Bush. But that brings me, in
a roundabout way, to my question: Can this marriage be saved?
Four months and change is a not-untypical length of time for a
passionate romance to burn itself out. We all know how it happens: The besotted
parties wipe the stars out of their eyes, see their partners clear for the
first time-and wonder, “Why did we think we ever had anything in common in the
first place?”
No one doubted that Bush was going to make a Republican speech
last night. The question was whether he would gesture towards anything
resembling a New York Republican kind
of speech last night-a speech a Pataki, or even a Bloomberg, could take home to
mother: one that could help lure, say, the upstate unemployed into the former’s
camp in his reelection fight next year with generous doses of truly compassionate
conservatism; or something that could provide some kind of cover for the
latter, the liberal-leaning former Democrat for whom a solid working
relationship with the White House will be so crucial in the year to come to
rebuild downtown. And, in a sense, the speech half-delivered.
Mr. Bush went into the State
of the Union staring down the barrel of some ugly facts. An NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll reported that
two in five Americans already feel the nation is back to normal or nearly
normal. Six of 10 think President Bush’s major domestic initiative-the expedited
$1.35 trillion tax cut-shouldn’t be delayed (and even Republicans are evenly
split on the issue), and agree with the President, who has declared that will
happen “over my dead body.” Karl Rove has declared that Mr. Bush’s success in
fighting the war will be enough to sustain the Republicans in the 2002
elections. But 44 percent of Americans-a reasonable number in any election-say
they will judge the success of the war against terrorism on the increasingly
dicey proposition of whether Osama Bin Laden is captured. Crawford’s
pieties-the “red-state” priorities-of God and Country and Patriotism seem to be
giving way to the old Democratic priorities of jobs, jobs, jobs.
The surveys show Americans now slightly more concerned with the
economy than with terrorism; and that, perhaps, is why a Fox News poll reported
that “if the election were held today,” only 49 percent of Americans would vote
for Bush-despite his wartime approval ratings upwards of 80 percent.
And so, not surprisingly, beyond the expected clarion wartime
calls to patriotism and service, there was something almost Clintonian about
it, or, if you will, Republican moderate. Much of it was the economy,
stupid-with its fervent appeals to Clinton-style national service, to welfarist
appeals to thin the gap between the haves and the have-nots, to “economic
security” over “economic stimulus.”
But I fear it was also Clintonian, in the more unwelcome sense of
the term, then any Republican would want to admit. It was not, in a word, a
trustworthy speech. Where once George Bush played Crawford, Texas to the
hilt-traveling incessantly through the “heartland,” not even giving the
Northeast, which gave him nothing on election Tuesday, the time of day-he now
plays down the tropes of folksy Southwestern populism. But where Texas was but
empty window dressing back in August, now he plays down the histrionics. Now
“Texas” is in the background. But the things Texas represents more and more
pulls the strings.
There is Enron, for one thing. The Bush family may be relative
newcomers, as things go, to the mythology of the American Southwest. It’s too
early to say just how dearly this White House will pay, politically, for its
associations with the now-defunct Houston energy trading company. But it was
not too hard to discern the vulnerability Bush must feel in that scandal’s wake
nonetheless. Kenneth Lay’s Enron is a state of mind that feels an awful lot
like Texas-a place where legend has it that you can only judge a real man by
the number of times he falls from grace, only to dust himself off and build
himself another empire. And whatever the actual biographical provenance of our
forty-third president-grandson of an Eastern Establishment senator from
Connecticut, son of an Eastern Establishment president that made of his family
a minor American political dynasty, and now a president who came to power with
the blessings of that Eastern Establishment now that he was the scion of one of
the great political dynasties of American history-has invented himself as the
soul of Texas itself. And a politician who wears Texan pride on his sleeve
cannot but tread carefully when Texan booms, as they so often do, go bust.
It is not a Texas boom if you sedulously insure yourself against
bust. For in the self-identity that Southwesterners have inculcated for
themselves-not for nothing is the historical pattern of the American Southwest
we are familiar with called a “mythology”-greatness must be built from
“nothing.” It is hard to imagine a Southwestern conservative sincerely
struggling on behalf of an ideal so banal as “economic security.” To be
secure-hemmed in by the bureaucratic niceties that protect you from risk-has
seemed nearly, to the greatest of these figures, to suffer a state of
unmanning: you are thereby rendered liberal.
Of course these desert myths are built (as it were) on sand.
Nothing comes from nothing. Some of the most famous Southwestern fortunes were
originally made in the exploitation of government largesse; Barry Goldwater’s
family began its retailing empire in Arizona profiteering off government
projects such as, first, the Indian Wars, and second, the building of the
state’s federally funded waterworks, without which no civilization could exist.
That Southwestern protestations of manly independence take on such a
characteristic of high camp is a direct function of their implausibility: a
reaction formation.
“Out here in the West,” Barry
Goldwater used to say, “we’re not harassed by the fear of what might happen.”
Goldwaters “have always taken risks.” Certainly more risks, at least, than the
former proprietor of Arbusto. And for converts like Bush-who seems to have
never dared looked back East between the time he left Yale and his White House
ascendancy-the lionization of those who tempt busts by building booms is all
the more zealous. As is the patronization of liberals-deep in the heart, as
they say.
It’s getting a little to late to wonder about whether the guy is
really a cowboy because he’s a convert and realize all cowboys are converts.
That’s the West for you
George W. Bush’s Texas habit pops up in odd places and at strange
times, like a stubborn rash. Last week, in a speech in Maine (roundabout the actual Bush family homestead in
Kennebunkport, which, President Bush sheepishly allowed, was “I guess my second
home”), George W. Bush brought up Crawford again. This time the message was more
awkward-he was giving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy his due for helping him pass a
bipartisan education bill (another of those Clintonian touches). “[T] he folks
back home at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas will be amazed when they see me
standing up there saying nice things about [Ted Kennedy].” The point seemed to
be little more than to signal that where he comes from-his “home”-they still
appreciate the value of a good Ted Kennedy joke. It’s that old, base,
Republican reactionary populism again.
I speak impressionistically, of course. But where is President Bush heading off to
first, today, to sell his new proposals to the nation? He is heading straight
into the welcoming arms of Dixie, Texas’s country cousin in reactionary
Republicanism. First stop is a “town-hall meeting,” with handpicked questioners,
in Winston-Salem, NC, then Daytona Beach and Atlanta. The symbolism is key.
Bush is an old-style conservative Republican of the Southern and Southwestern;
it is where his deepest sympathies lay; but which show up only fugitively in
his most carefully scripted public orations.
George W. Bush’s Northeastern vacation seems soon to be over if
it isn’t already, and he’s going back home, far from the place his Presidency
was reborn, here; back to the place where he was reborn-south toward home, to
Crawford.
