How Does Bush Do It?

How Does Bush Do It?
Pat BooneMonday, Oct. 25, 2004 Lots of folks just don’t get it.Millions of Americans, mostly liberal Democrats and high-profile entertainers and 90 percent of the media elite, are aghast and disbelieving the president’s lead in the polls leading to the election Nov. 2. How can it possibly be?

Several hundred million dollars have been spent on blistering, derisive and belittling attacks on the president, on television, in print and on radio, in mail campaigns and even on sensationalized and highly publicized concert tours. Billionaire George Soros and other mega-millionaires have given more lavishly in seething hatred and condemnation of the president than at any time in America’s history – and yet the pugnacious middle-weight George W. Bush, like the fabled Timex watch, “takes a lickin’ but keeps on tickin’”!
How can this be? It just doesn’t make sense – at least if you’re humanistic liberal in your thinking.
And that’s the point, the whole point.
A majority of middle Americans, though not as large a majority as previously, just aren’t humanistic liberals. They are old-fashioned, Bible-believing and moral citizens, and they’ll overlook a lot in their leaders, if the leaders look and seem like them. And George W. Bush, with all of his occasional fumbles and garbled syntax and inability to correctly pronounce “nuclear,” is a homeboy, a neighbor kid who got into government and made a big difference. Remember Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”? That kind of guy – not slick or glib, but sleeves-rolled-up hardworking, honest and direct and good-from-the-gut.
A Harry Truman kind of guy, the unspectacular, plain-talking Kansas City haberdasher who became president when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died so suddenly. Many today can remember their feelings of dismay when this rather insignificant little man took over the presidency of the United States. “He can’t do this!” they cried. “What’s going to happen to us?”
But he too rolled up his sleeves, put a little plaque on his desk that said “The buck stops here” and began to make tough, history-making decisions. He dropped the first atomic bombs, knowing that noncombatant Japanese would die in a surprise attack – but that bold, horrific move saved thousands of American lives, probably even more Japanese lives, and ended the second World War abruptly. Not many men would have been tough or brave or decisive enough to do that, but Harry Truman was.
And today, the little haberdasher from Kansas City is thought by many historians to be one of our most able presidents.
Middle America (not just geographically but sociologically) sees George W. Bush as another Harry Truman. And not just because he has become a tough, gritty commander in chief, leading us into a controversial pre-emptive war against global terrorism – but because he represents and champions the moral values that have defined America since its beginnings and given us our character and identity in the world.
That’s the main thing the humanist liberal don’t get; they can’t figure why so many millions of Americans still want marriage to be defined as between a man and a woman, demand a freedom to speak openly about their faith anywhere, any time, and certainly include the words “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance, and devoutly believe that the life of an infant is sacred, in the womb or out. To them, these ideas are passé, outmoded, and irrelevant. They just don’t get it.
But George W. Bush does. And so Americans get George W. Bush.