In an April 23, 2006, Op-Ed contribution to the New York Times, David Gergen writes about several presidents who, when confronted with declining popularity and mounting opposition, either made substantial personnel and policy changes or didn’t. The ones who didn’t ultimately went down in history as failures.
Here are the last three paragraphs of Gergen’s piece:
:…Mr. Bush should have embraced the Reagan model of recovery last fall, when many urged it in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the indictment of I. Lewis Libby. He had a decent chance to rebuild his presidency at that time. But he refused to change anything, choosing instead to “hang in” with the same policies, politics and personnel. Half a year has now passed, allowing the attitudes of those who were losing faith then to crystallize and harden.
The current shuffle is coming extremely late for a recovery too late, probably and so far, the administration has not brought in any outside heavyweights. The timing and nature of the shake-up signals that Mr. Bush’s primary interest is in better management and marketing. Those will help, but they almost certainly will not be enough to rescue his presidency from its low approval ratings and loss of public confidence.
Mr. Bush has to want to change. He has to want to change policies like those on Iraq, energy and taxes; practices like secrecy; and politics like those that cater only to his base. Is he a leader whose resolve will ultimately become self-defeating stubbornness, or is he capable of flexibility, like his hero President Reagan? Much rides on the answer.”
Now I possess no overarching authority anywhere near that of a psychoanalyst but the following seems readily apparent to any layperson viewing George Bush’s life as a whole.
1) The only substantial personal changes readily apparent in George Bush are ending his alcohol abuse and becoming an evangelical Christian. The genesis of his sobriety was the threat by his wife to take the children and leave him–an outside force with tremendous leverage threatening him. The source for his religious conversion seems less known, at least to me.
But what about true or actual transformation? Internally, George Bush has remained the same. He’s just sober now. The primary deleterious effect of his alcohol abuse was to bring out the ‘bad’ George Bush, the part of his persona he has generally (but not always) been able to camouflage while sober. He is and has always been someone at his core consumed by fear, anger and self-hate–fear of people discovering the demons that truly haunt him (the real George Bush) and anger and self-hate about never measuring up to the life successes of his father, and even his brother.
Just look at the over-compensatory aspects of George Bush’s persona: the swagger, the use of Wild West lawman lingo towards Ben-Laden, the ranch (that has no crops or livestock)–all symbols that are of use politically and induce a convenient veneer to those viewing Bush–yet are empty vessels that fail in convincing Bush himself of any worthiness. The ‘metamorphosis’ may have been a mile wide but an inch deep.
All his glorious accomplishments, winning election and re-election as President (his father couldn’t achieve the latter and his brother has yet to even try) and his ‘re-make’ of the Middle East (his father was too ‘scared’ to attempt this) are blowing up in his face. Blowback that is destroying him internally as less and less people ‘buy’ his act, (the growing discussion and items in print about being the worst president ever) despite the costume changes.
George Bush in his fifties is the George Bush of his twenties, simply minus the alcohol. His actions make this transparent. There is no evident maturity. Change, adaptation, evolution is not possible for him because he views such as weakness, as wrong and therefore failure, instead of as a positive development. Such is not the light in which George Bush can ever view himself, let alone allow himself to be seen. Nakedness is a vulnerability he will not assume. All is black and white, win or lose for him. Fear and self-hate trumping common sense.
The only hope for any sort of a George Bush personal renaissance is someone or something leveraging him into modification or reformation. But remember, even Laura Bush was able to achieve but a cessation of drinking. Can a Democratic House of Representatives, with congressional subpoena power (a big November, 2006 assumption) force more? That’s more than likely the only hope.
2) The second insurmountable obstacle that refutes the possibility of alteration is that George Bush’s political success to date has come about as the result of placing his fortune in the hands of Karl Rove. Rove being someone who, to achieve desired political outcomes, has sold his soul and that of anyone else necessary, to the devil. There is but one bottomline for Rove and that is victory, and therefore, power–regardless of whatever actions are required.
Rove is a marketing genius but one who has achieved his success via flagrant personal abuses and the employment of immoral actions (see “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential”).
Karl Rove knows but one way–hardball, with as many curves and screwballs as he can toss. That makes him kin with George Bush.
Rove (and therefore Bush) will never “want to change policies like those on Iraq, energy and taxes; practices like secrecy” as Gergen suggests. That is not how Rove operates and certainly anathema to his core beliefs.
Like George Bush, Karl Rove’s oxygen is power–the power to force others to respect him and to force submission. He delights in hammering those who put up even the most miniscule of objections or, daresay, roadblocks–as if steamrollering an opponent, however slight, somehow orgasmically exorcises past painful memories of not fitting in, of being an outcast, of ridicule, of failure.
But even geniuses trip up at times, especially those believing their own press clippings and whose method of operation centers around the use of nefarious subterfuge. Ultimately, an error or miscalculation occurs and some being, some entity cannot or wiil not be manipulated or cowered (see the outing of Valerie Plame and Patrick Fitzgerald).
As with #1 above concerning George Bush, can Karl Rove be ‘forced’ into personal rehabilitation? A kinder, gentler Rove? It’s unlikely, at least not until all avenues of escape have been explored and attempted. And even then, he’ll sell out anyone he can in an attempt to escape personal penalty. It appears he is already doing so in the Fitzgerald/Plame investigation.
But he isn’t interested in ever playing ‘nice’–there’s no element of satisfying revenge or personal redemption in that. He’ll do it as long as no alternative is available, as long as a prison cell looms in his future or else.
David Gergen has badly mistaken the character of the two most important individuals in the equation concerning the resurrection of President Bush.
