The Real Bush

October 13, 2004 home

The Real Bush
Issue of 2004-10-18Posted 2004-10-11
This week in the magazine and here online (see Fact), in “Remember the Alamo,” Nicholas Lemann writes about how George W. Bush has pursued a surprisingly radical agenda as President. Here Lemann talks with The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson about Bush’s skills as a politician, his plans for Iraq, and what he might do if reëlected this fall.
AMY DAVIDSON: Your piece in this week’s magazine includes something of a mea culpa—you say that a conclusion you drew about Bush when you wrote about him in 2000 was very wrong. What was that conclusion, and where did you go astray?
NICHOLAS LEMANN: My conclusion last time around was that Bush wanted to be President but did not have a big agenda. I thought of it as a Bush restoration, and that, in Bush’s mind, merely removing the awfulness of Clinton and Gore from the White House would be a major achievement. But I underestimated—and Bush underplayed—the magnitude of his ambition to change government policy.
Was there a bait and switch, or was Bush always up front about what he wanted—whether or not those who were listening to him believed it?
Bush has a politician’s gift for saying things that some people hear one way and other people hear another way. Most of what he has done as President he did say he would do. In the course of a long campaign, a candidate says so much that attention naturally goes mostly to the main slogans. In Bush’s case, these sounded moderate and modest—or, at least, they sounded that way to people who were inclined to hear them that way. I didn’t fully understand until after the election how much Bush had already tilted to the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
The title of your piece is “Remember the Alamo.” What should we remember about the Alamo when thinking about this President?
Texas was, for a short time, an independent republic, and its founding myths are quite different from those of the country’s as a whole. In the Texas story, there’s rather less of a bunch of intellectuals sitting around arguing over the drafting of philosophical documents, and rather more of martial valor on the battlefield.
We hear a lot about the importance of loyalty in this Administration. But is this unusual? Don’t all Presidents demand loyalty from their staffs?
All Presidents want loyalty, but Bush is better than most at getting it. That’s partly because people sense that disloyalty will be punished more severely than it usually is, and partly because Bush insists that his closest advisers give him total devotion. All of the top people on Bush’s campaign team work only for Bush—and this is not true of the top people on Kerry’s campaign team. Bush made Karl Rove sell his consulting business back in the early days of the 2000 Presidential campaign. Mark McKinnon, the media and advertising guy for Bush, and Matthew Dowd, the “chief strategist,” are former Democrats who are Bush people, not established Republican consultants; McKinnon’s company, Maverick Media, works only for Bush. Karen Hughes works only for Bush. And so on.
How does a President who, as you write, was raised in the very epicenter of the American élite manage to come across as anti-élitist?
It all depends on how you define élite, as another President might say. This country doesn’t have one élite, it has competing élites, and the élite that one finds around universities, media companies, foundations, and such institutions is the one that Bush is against. Conversely, that élite wouldn’t have picked Bush as its leader.
When do you think that President Bush decided to go to war in Iraq? And why?
Nobody knows exactly when Bush decided on war with Iraq, or why, and we may not know for sure for many years. Right now it’s a “Rashomon” story—although hardly anybody seems to believe that Bush decided only after the United Nations inspection process. My own favorite theory had been that Bush invaded Iraq because he believed that it was the best way to begin an enormous project of remaking the politics of the Middle East, on the scale of America’s project in Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.
In your article, you write that the President’s Iraq policy was formed in a realm of statecraft that was “a natural outgrowth of who he is.” What do you mean by that?
This is not an Administration that has a lot of secret plans. The plan in Iraq seems to be to try to take back the areas of the country held by insurgents, which will be a violent process, to the extent that elections are possible in January. I would assume that after the election the process will become more forceful. Whether meaningful elections can be held on schedule, and whether they can result in a political regime that can control Iraq, is not at all clear. I don’t know what this Administration would do if confronted with a choice between keeping a big armed force there and withdrawing, if that would seem to mean that Iraq would become a “failed state.”
In the Vice-Presidential debate, Dick Cheney complained that the Administration had “not been able to do what the President did in Texas, for example, when he was able to reach across the aisle and bring Democrats along.” Did something change on the way from Austin to D.C.?
In Texas, you don’t have to reach as far across the aisle, because Democrats are much more conservative there than they are nationally. Also, Bush had a stronger incentive to reach out, because his reputation for bipartisanship was a big selling point in his first Presidential campaign. He has not done the kind of reaching out in Washington that he did in Texas.
What can we expect if Bush is reëlected?
If Bush is reëlected, I think that he will move forcefully to reduce taxes further, and to change Social Security and Medicare fundamentally through the introduction of private accounts, as an alternative to a straightforward government-guaranteed pension and health-care system. These changes, if Bush can get them, will substantially reduce the role of the federal government in American life. Foreign affairs is harder to predict, because of the difficulty of figuring out whether Bush has been genuinely chastened by his failure in Iraq. If he hasn’t, he may aggressively seek regime change in more Middle Eastern nations.