Glenn Greenwald uses the following to justify his belief in George W. Bush’s religious sincerity.
By all accounts — including his own — George Bush had a severe addiction to alcohol for many years. Yet he was able, suddenly and with great resolution, to conquer his alcoholism and give up drinking entirely. At the same time, he transformed his life quite fundamentally — from a carousing drunken hedonist into someone who, again by all accounts, began attending church very frequently and focusing on his businesses and career (usually with very little success, but his priorities nonetheless clearly changed).
Greenwald goes on to discuss the importance of accepting a higher power in any recovery program. In other words, Bush could not have successfully kicked his alcohol habit without some kind of genuine religious conversion. I’ll leave that argument to medical doctors and psychiatrists. I find it to be dubious.
George W. Bush straitened himself out in 1986, right at the time that his father made the final decision to run for president. What was Dubya’s role in his father’s campaign?
Though George W. Bush had no official title on the campaign staff, he was his father’s most trusted confidant and a major point of contact for his colleagues. He also became known as a talented speaker and as the campaign’s chief liaison to Christian conservatives.
That’s strange. The man had only found the Methodist version of God the year before. After his father’s election to the White House, Dubya moved back to Texas and made a killing with the Texas Rangers.
Not long thereafter he and Karl Rove set their sights on the governor’s mansion. Bush needed to scrub his history of carousing, drug use, and avoiding military service requirements. Enter the myth of the born-again story. Here he repeats it in a 1999 interview.
Why did you quit drinking?
A couple of things happened. One, you know, the Billy Graham visit in 1985. I met with Billy, but it’s like a mustard seed. You know, he planted a seed in my heart and I began to change. . . . I realized that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people.
Yes, sometimes I would go to a party and drink too much. No, I would not drink too much on a daily basis. I never drank during the day.
You quit drinking and you became more spiritual. Talk about that a little bit.
To put it in spiritual terms, I accepted Christ. What influenced me was the spirituality, sure, which led me to believe that if you change your heart, you can change your behavior. There’s a lot of drug rehabilitation programs and some that are based upon exactly what I went through, which is spiritually based – that’s what AA is really based upon.
You think Karl Rove or Karen Hughes didn’t write that mustard seed rubbish?
Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. (Matthew 13:31-32)
George W. Bush didn’t come up with that by himself. It’s stagecraft. Here is what I think.
Bush had a midlife crisis in 1986. His father was concerned that he would damage his election prospects. His wife was sick of his crap. He needed to get his head in order and act like a grown-up. Save his marriage and not screw up his Daddy’s big shot. He may have decided to do some bible study as a way of getting his wife off his back. Maybe he got something out of it and it helped him to have a support group that was non-judgmental. Maybe he leaned on this to give him strength. But, far more important, he was assigned the job of making evangelicals comfortable about his father during the 1988 campaign. The evangelicals knew that Poppy had been a latecomer to the pro-life movement. Here’s a little reminder:
1988 Iowa Caucus Results
Robert Dole 40,661 37.4%
Pat Robertson 26,761 24.6%
George Bush 20,194 18.6%
Jack Kemp 12,088 11.1%
Pete DuPont 7,999 7.3%
No preference 739 .7%
Alexander Haig 364 .3%
When Pat Robertson beat the sitting vice-president in Iowa caucuses it was obvious that some aggressive outreach was required. Dubya was the man with that job. And he made many important contacts while he played that role.
Karl Rove tried to parlay those contacts into a 1990 run for governor of Texas.
It was Mr. Rove who tried to convince the then-managing partner of the Texas Rangers to run for governor in 1990, succeeded in 1994 and managed every Bush political campaign since.
Along the way, Mr. Rove developed a divide-and-conquer model of winning campaigns. Instead of consensus politics, Mr. Rove targeted select groups in the GOP base. Each group – Christian conservatives, tax-cutters, suburban security moms – could be motivated by hot-button issues – gay marriage, lower taxes, the looming threat of terrorism.
It wasn’t just targeting Christian conservatives for its own sake, it was essential to convince people that Bush had reformed himself. Bush needed to learn to play a role, and his experience courting and commiserating with evangelicals helped him to know just what to say.
Bush won the 1994 election. In 1998 it came time to create another myth. Bush wanted to run for the White House. It was time to buy a ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush was going to become a cowboy. George W. Bush is no more of a cowboy than he is a Rockette. But by getting started early, well before the beginning of the campaign, he was able to make that claim. I don’t see Bush’s conversion to evangelicalism as much different from his conversion to clearing brush. Bush’s conversion may have had some utility in his efforts to control his drinking, but it was of far more utility to his father’s campaign and, later, to his own.
Lest Greenwald misinterpret me, I am not doubting Bush’s faith because I think a sincere faith would somehow excuse his behavior. The fact that I doubt his rancher credentials has no bearing on the legitimacy of his policies. His profession of faith, if sincere, would not justify his actions either. In both cases, I suspect an act. It is a very elaborate and sustained act, no doubt. And it is his ability to carry out these frauds convincingly that leads me to attribute far more native intelligence to Bush than most of his critics are willing to ascribe.
Bush is shallow, uninformed, incurious, and impulsive. You don’t make a decision to launch a war in Iraq without knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite unless you are almost willfully ignorant and grossly negligent. But Bush’s case for war is not simple because his knowledge is limited.
The simplicity of his message is self-conscious. It’s about catapulting the propaganda.
“See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
Bush and Rove know how to con the people. Bush’s persona is mostly an act. He may be genuinely inarticulate, but he is a master of playing a role.
In my opinion, our foreign policy has been framed in a simplistic, dualistic, Manichean way because the Rove team and the neo-conservative team have mastered propaganda. I don’t think Bush is any more genuinely religious than William Kristol or Richard Perle. But they all know how to get the conservative mind to support their imperial policies: faith and fear. They all ran this playbook before…back when we were fighting the godless communists.
