Hyping Bush’s problems

I have nothing against the press going after a sitting president, even in
a somewhat combative, or even unfair, manner.

The president of the United States is the chief symbol and holder of personal centralized power in this country, and personal centralized power is at all times and in all
places the long-term enemy of personal freedom and individual
responsibility. So the more the president and the presidency are bashed
and undermined – no matter which placeholder is occupying the Oval Office
at the moment – the better it usually is for liberty, which is the true
interest of every decent American.

But you’d think my colleagues in the media, some of whom are reputed to
have IQs higher than room temperature, could be a little less unsubtle
about the sheer partisanship lurking behind what might otherwise be quite
commendable sneers directed at George W. Bush. The worst aspect is that
when the attacks are so transparently partisan it ends up helping this
particular president much more than it hurts him. And while it might be
cheering to the soul to see the media hacks get a comeuppance once in a
while, over the long term strengthening the presidency poses serious
dangers to liberty.

The media were almost a caricature of themselves during the run-up to
Dubya’s excellent little adventure in Europe this week. For several days
prior to the trip the headlines anticipating heavy-duty confrontations
between the hayseed from Texas who hadn’t had the intellectual curiosity
to travel much before running for president and the sleek, sophisticated,
thoroughly admirable leaders of today’s Europe, who would give the untried
youngster a lesson in world politics. Eric Alterman of the Nation
chortled that “the issues that divide the European and U.S. governments
loom far larger than any photo-op can hope to obscure.”

Sure they are. Pardon me while I yawn at the laziness of the easy
stereotyping.

It is possibly a sign of the utter intellectual emptiness of the “liberal”
persuasion in American politics that these guys can’t get beyond the
conviction that Bush is a disaster because he’s stupid and unqualified.
Possibly that is to avoid actual discussion of substantive issues like
global warming, the Kyoto Treaty, missile defense and other policy issues
associated with the Bushies. It’s much easier to imply (you don’t actually
have to say it and it’s better if you don’t actually say it) that only
stupid people with no experience or curiosity could hold such positions
than to discuss them on their merits.

Meanwhile, although Dubya ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, perhaps,
and hardly a natural intellectual, he has proven to be sharper and more
politically astute than his critics time and time again. You would think
that after the campaign, the debates, the post-election gang war in
Florida, the State of the Union, the Cabinet appointments, the successful
passage of the tax cut – all wins for Dubya against people who were
supposed to be much smarter, much more politically astute and much more in
touch with the pulse of the people – that his critics would move beyond
the dumb-guy-with-no-discernible-skills caricature and start to wonder
why this guy with no assets keeps handing them their heads.

Perhaps I’m missing the point. If people had the capacity to learn from
their own and others’ experience, by definition they would not long be
liberals (or at least liberals in the cloudy and not especially
enlightening way the term is applied in American politics). I’m not saying
that’s an answer but it might be an interesting hypothesis.

At any rate, the build-up to the Bush trip to Europe proceeded according
to stereotype only to be quashed by the reality. Bush was shrewd enough to
schedule bilateral visits only to Spain and Poland, two of the very few
European countries ruled by center-right governments. He was greeted with
respect and maybe even a teeny bit of warmth; he is the president of the
world’s most successful superpower, after all, as we are sometimes
inclined to forget. He committed a few of his patented Bushisms and
sounded somewhat cloying from time to time. But he committed no major
gaffes and offended deeply no interests that are especially important to
the United States.

At this rate, he may come to be as well liked personally as Bill Clinton
seems to have been by European leaders before it’s all over. And the
presidency as an institution is likely to be strengthened.

The comparison with Clinton demonstrates the general partisanship of most
of the American media. There were stories in advance of some of Mr.
Clinton’s trips to the effect that he seemed to be a politician more
concerned with domestic issues than international issues and might be a
bit out of his depth in international waters. But there was almost none of
the stereotyping as a bumbling American rube about to be despised by those
sophisticated and worldly Europeans – as there was with Reagan and the
senior Bush.

There were some exceptions. Michael Kelly (who has probably had his union card as a member of the conventional-wisdom-spewing media elite rescinded
already) noted that “Bush did not kill Kyoto. He buried its moldering corpse.” A few stories noted that despite rhetorical fealty to the sacred precepts of the Kyoto Protocol not a single European Union country has yet ratified the treaty. It could well turn out that most European statesmen know perfectly well that actual enforcement of the Kyoto regulations would ruin their own industrialized economies and that Bush is doing them a favor by taking the heat on the issue.

Anne Abblebaum also had an interesting piece in which she argued that the supposedly deep and yawning “values gap” between Europeans
and Americans is seriously overblown. Europeans, especially the
leftist-oriented media and political elites, still love to bash the
upstart United States, she noted, but ordinary Europeans don’t flock to
McDonald’s and Hollywood movies because they are repulsed by the supposed
values gap on things like the death penalty, commercialism, Kyoto and
environmentalism and missile defense. If anything, at the levels of
popular culture and values expressed in action, Europeans and Americans
may be converging.

Such voices were barely heard in the torrent of gleeful handwringing over
the deep divides between Bush and those marvelous Europeans. Now the media
will have to cope in their usual way – by ignoring the fact and
pretending they never bludgeoned the stereotypes to excess – with the
fact that Bush didn’t show up in chaps and cowboy hat and shock the
Europeans with his sheer hayseediness.

In the process, they’ll probably miss the real story – that the
supposedly huge issues that divide European and American leaders are
relatively trivial disagreements and some of them aren’t all that
divisive. Bush may or may not end up building some kind of a missile
defense system – I’ll believe it when I see it and I’m taking bets that
it will be much more expensive and much less effective than advertised –
but European leaders know that if he really wants to do so they won’t stop
him. So they’ll be content to appreciate the fact that at least he talked
with them first and seemed to listen during conversations.

The Kyoto treaty is a thoroughly phony issue and most Europeans surely
know it. It represents the high tide of environmental scare tactics and
regulatory rigidity translated – or at least almost translated – into an
official international document. But no European country really wants to
abide by it and they will be happy to see it dumped, even as they use the
dumping to dump on greedy Americans.

When he spoke to NATO ministers in Brussels, Bush uttered all the standard
pieties about the indispensability of this cold war relic. And that’s what
most European political leaders really wanted to hear. Bush won’t start to
dismantle NATO, and he’s unlikely to bring the troops home from Bosnia or
Kosovo without solemn consultations in advance. So while he might be a
handy figure of fun in Europe, he won’t be scary in the way that an
earlier incarnation of Jesse Helms (he’s not so feisty lately) might have
been genuinely alarming as a U.S. president.

None of this should be especially comforting or reassuring to Americans
who believe American liberties and national independence would be better
served by bringing U.S. troops home from social-work assignments in
various trouble spots and resolving not to be so heavily involved in the
problems and tribulations of various parts of the world. Bush clearly let
the Europeans and NATO-crats know he is one of the boys and is unlikely to
upset the comfortable applecart in which the floating crap game of the
“international community” of professional leeches cruises from one
meaningless international conference held in a notable warm-weather resort
to another.

So life will go on, and those few Americans who set any store by the way
the American president is perceived overseas will eventually be able to
breathe a sigh of relief knowing that Dubya has moved beyond caricature
and gets along just fine with those pesky furriners. The media will learn
nothing and will trot out somewhat paler versions of the same old
stereotypes before the next trip.

By the fourth overseas trip or so they will be writing about the
unexpected panache and shrewdness Dubya has displayed in foreign voyages
as if they had never written that such an outcome was as close to an
impossibility as anything on this sad old earth. And the institution of
the presidency, along with the impulse of the president to turn to foreign
affairs whenever things get dicey on the domestic political front, will be
strengthened.

Say, you don’t suppose the mediacrats also know all this and the
apparently vicious stereotyping of Dubya was a bit of a ploy, designed to
elicit, in the long run, new respect and power for the current president
and the office he holds? That would be an interesting conspiracy theory.

Nah. I think.