We are seeing this week the turning against the president from his own. They trusted him. They thought he would appoint someone who would advance the ideology they wanted. I don’t know if the Democrats read this event right off as one to sit out….but I would not be surprised.
I remembered the way Howard Dean talked about the issue of George W. Bush and his Christian base in his book called “You Have the Power”. It was published last September. He was quite candid about Bush and what he thought when they were governors together.
He begins by telling about why he ran for president, and the ineptness of Bush was one of the reasons.
I hadn’t started out a Bush-basher. In fact, I’d been predisposed to like George Bush. I knew him personally and had dealt with him professionally when we were both governors. He’d always been charming and hospitable to me and my family, both in the Governor’s Mansion in Texas and at the White House. He’d always been more than upright in the business dealings between our states, keeping his word when he had no legal obligation to do so.
What I knew of his record in Texas bespoke a moderate man who was willing to put pragmatism before ideology, to raise taxes when necessary to equalize state education spending, and to take some heat from the right wing of his party for doing so. (“I hate those people,” he’d once snarled at me when I ribbed him at a White House governors’ gathering about some trouble he was having in Texas with the Christian Coalition.)
I’d approached his presidency with an open mind. ‘I hadn’t voted for Bush, but I didn’t expect the worst of him, either. After all, I’d always been in the moderate middle of my own party — a staunch advocate of fiscal discipline, a devotee of balanced budgets, pro-choice but also pro-gun owners’ rights, and in favor of the death penalty in some instances.
Dean shows his pragmatic nature when he says that he had as governor worked with and respected Republicans who were responsible. He just assumed he would be able to do the same with George Bush. It is interesting to follow his thinking, as I really believe he was very open-minded about it to begin with.
I was shocked when the president set out to dismantle the social programs that Americans hold most dear: Social Security and Medicare. When he set out to undermine our system of public education with a bill called No Child Left Behind, which threatened to classify every public school in America as a failed institution within nine years. When he took aim at women through virulent anti-choice policies and at ethnic minorities through his repeated references to nonexistent “quotas.”
None of this squared with the George Bush I knew. The lies and manipulations that lay behind such sham policies as No Child Left Behind (or No School Board Left Standing, as I came to call it) shocked me, coming from a man I remembered as having truly cared about things like education reform and improving opportunity for all children.
The sheer stupidity of much of what came out of the White House surprised me, because I knew firsthand that George W. Bush was not, by any means, a stupid man.
Dean concluded that he had just disconnected himself from the people, that he did not want to know the details of how his policies were affecting others.
That lack of caring, that shrugging off of the details of ordinary Americans’ lives, was every bit as enraging to me as purposeful, hateful extremism. It seemed to me, in some ways, even worse. It was callous and opportunistic. And it showed a willingness to put real people — real,ordinary Americans — in jeopardy.
Following that he blasts his fellow Democrats in that chapter for going along with these destructive policies of the president. But then that is a story for another day. A good one. But not now.
