Hubris and chutzpah. Chutzpah and hubris. These are the words that keep looping through my brain as I try to answer, for myself, the question so many Americans find themselves asking today: How could the presidency of George W. Bush have gone so radically wrong?
We know that Bush ignored the peculiar circumstances of the 2000 election — losing the popular vote, winning the Florida electoral votes only after an unprecedented and still violently controversial Supreme Court decision — and betrayed his own promise of being a “uniter not a divider”: From the start, he chose to govern from the right, not the center.
But it was only after 9/11 that the characteristic traits of Bush’s presidency came into full flush. At this potentially transformative moment the nation, stricken by outrage and tragedy, setting aside party labels, stood behind its president. It gave him everything he asked for, and waited to be asked for far more.
We stood behind Bush, but he did not stand up for us. Instead of capitalizing on good will from his opposition and from abroad — instead of inviting in Democrats, pulling together a national-unity style government and assembling a grand global alliance to face the threats of a post 9/11 world — President Bush executed one of history’s most shameful bait-and-switch maneuvers. He took the political and emotional capital 9/11 bequeathed him and squandered it in a foolish, unnecessary and tragic war in Iraq. That war has left the U.S. in greater danger than before, depleted our financial and military resources and robbed us of our options in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. It is a terrible, and terrifying, legacy for whichever candidate wins tomorrow’s election.
But at least John Kerry starts the trip without the luggage. Iraq is Bush’s war, and both his words and his actions have demonstrated that he is incompetent to prosecute it.
One of the first books of contemporary political history I read while growing up was David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” — the definitive story of how a handful of brilliant and mostly well-intentioned Ivy League intellectuals drove America into the Vietnam quagmire and then closed their eyes to, or covered up, the consequences of their error.
It was a story of hubris — of impudent ambition and self-willed blindness laid low. I remember thinking, reading Halberstam’s account as an adolescent, that however awful the price of the Vietnam mistake was, at least we’d learned from it. We’d lost a lot in Vietnam — but we also left our hubris there. Let a small cadre of true-believers take control of the nation’s foreign policy? Destroy villages in order to save them? Introduce democracy at riflepoint? We’d make lots of mistakes, but we’d never make those mistakes again.
So here we are in 2004, and it’s plain that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company not only never served in Vietnam itself, but never took its awful lessons to heart. The outcome of their failures is now splayed across each day’s news. They scorned Vietnam’s most pragmatic teaching of all — that you can’t make good decisions if your government is telling lies to itself.
This is the Bush team’s chutzpah: Their apparent belief that the only real mistake their Vietnam-era predecessors made was in not deceiving well enough. Unlike the leak-prone, division-riven Johnson Democrats, Bush’s Republicans would march to the same spin, deliver the same rosy scenarios, present the same united front. All is well. Never mind the mess in the field. Don’t send bad news up the chain of command or you’ll get in trouble. And there is no such thing as a photo of a coffin.
Everyone makes mistakes, and many people are incapable of learning from them. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to hold one’s biggest mistakes aloft like trophies. The Bush campaign has adopted its candidate’s most alarming and appalling failures as a leader of a nation under attack — the inability to apprehend Osama bin Laden, the Iraq-war diversion — as banners of triumph. We’re supposed to ignore every other issue and re-elect the president because, hell, don’t we know there’s a war on?
Yet it is precisely for his record as a “war president” that Bush has already lost the traditional incumbent’s advantage, and goes into tomorrow’s elections with even less certainty of winning than he had in 2000. And it is precisely because the war still needs to be won that George Bush, a man whose hubris and chutzpah have betrayed his country, needs to lose this election.
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