| Tuesday, October 14, 2003 |
10:04 - The least REMF President ever
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1062382,00.html
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Following a sudden rebound in Bush's popularity rating, which has been sagging lately under an early campaign warmup by the Democrats that has gone largely uncontested from the White House, there's this Guardian article by George Monbiot, found by Tim Blair:
Now Bush, of course, is commander-in-chief as well as president, and he has every right to address the troops. But this commander-in-chief goes far beyond the patriotic blandishments of previous leaders. He sometimes dresses up in the uniform of the troops he is meeting.
He quotes their mottoes and songs, retells their internal jokes, mimics their slang. He informs the "dog-faced soldiers" that they are "the rock of Marne", or asks naval cadets whether they gave "the left-handed salute to Tecumseh, the God of 2.0". The television audience is mystified, but the men love him for it. He is, or so his speeches suggest, one of them.
He starts by leading them in chants of "Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah!", then plasters them with praise and reminds them that their pay, healthcare and housing (unlike those of any other workers in America) are being upgraded. After this, they will cheer everything he says. So he uses these occasions to attack his opponents and announce new and often controversial policies.
The marines were the first to be told about his interstate electricity grid; he instructed the American Legion about the reform of the Medicare programme; last week he explained his plans for the taxation of small businesses to the national guard. The troops may not have the faintest idea what he's talking about, but they cheer him to the rafters anyway. After that, implementing these policies looks like a patriotic duty.
This strikes me as an abuse of his position as commander-in-chief, rather like the use of Air Force One (the presidential aeroplane) for political fundraising tours...
...Or like landing on the USS Lincoln to congratulate the troops after taking Baghdad, yes?
Monbiot finds it creepy that Bush is so conversant with military slang and the soldier's mindset. He thinks it's a cheap shot, a low blow-- that if Bush tells the Marines about his kooky plans first of all, after buttering them up with carefully rehearsed lines, they'll believe anything he tells them-- and that this will immediately confer a landslide popular victory to Bush in 2004. 'Cause, you know, like, every able-bodied registered voter in the United States is in the military. Or something.
Monbiot mutters about facts and figures from socialist websites and "appointed" Presidents, in what I honestly don't have the time to decode. (Hey, there's a reason why I haven't been posting much of anything for the past few days. Deadlines. The kind that make you wonder whether it might be a good idea to run away to live in a cave for a few years until it all blows over.)
But as Blair notes, this article is more telling than I think Monbiot intends. It means that Bush is, quite frankly, a lot more shrewd than those who dismiss him so rapidly as a "moron" can imagine believing. Those whose comedy routines and book proposals are predicated on verbal gaffes and SNL-esque caricatures of the President won't want for material, certainly, because the feckless and moronic caricature version of Bush has taken on a life of its own-- owing nothing to reality, it nonetheless comes across as received wisdom to anybody already predilected toward believing it. And Bush the actual person does little to dispel the myths.
Except to the military, apparently.
It's easy to dismiss his landing on the Lincoln as a "publicity stunt", a cheap and cynical ploy to bolster morale among the only constituency he really cares about during wartime. But look: The man did not just stretch a flightsuit over a beer gut, hoist himself into the back seat of an escorted military transport, and land at a base under guard somewhere. He took a Navy jet-- an S-3B Viking-- and what's more, he flew it:
Bush said he did take a turn at piloting the craft.
"Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course, I liked it," said Bush, who was an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1968.
What the Secret Service didn't allow him to do-- aside from taking an FA-18, which Bush reportedly wanted to do, but the spooks were going to be having none of that, opting instead for the Viking, the safest jet in the fleet, and painting "Navy 1" on the tail-- was land the thing. Do you know how dangerous it is to land on an aircraft carrier, even in a Viking? Do you know how hard it is? Anybody who's ever played a flight-simulator game might think it's a bitch, but it's quite a bit more intense than any game can convey. The noise, the vibrations, the G-forces, the sudden deceleration... and the constant knowledge that the slightest misstep or mechanical failure will send you skidding off the deck into the water a hundred feet below where you'll sink before they can rescue you, or plowing into the stern of the carrier in a blazing fireball. People die in carrier landings all the time-- and these are trained pilots, people who do it for a living, who do it every day. And this time it was carrying a sitting President of the United States. The man whose personal safety is probably guarded with more obsession and paranoia and infrastructure than any other in the entire world. The man who, if the Secret Service had its way, would be encased head-to-toe in Nerf from swearing-in to stepping-down.
If you ask me, this is an entirely fitting way to commemorate the event. (And for what it's worth, I can't think of too many Presidents who would have looked hotter in that flightsuit.)
All this means that the message that Bush means to sent to the soldiers, very explicitly, is that I understand what it's like to be one of you. Clinton might have put on the Basset-hound eyes while telling the cameras that "I feel your pain", but who could really take that seriously? But imagine yourself as a Navy pilot on the Lincoln. To see your commander-in-chief come sailing in on a Viking, after having flown it at least part of the way, and then go through a real, honest-to-God deck landing, catch the arrest wire, and step out wreathed in smiles... well, there's not a man on that deck, or indeed in the whole military, who didn't receive the message loud and clear. The message was-- and this has been said before, but it bears repeating-- that this is a President willing to put himself through the same trials and risks that he asks of his armed forces. I mean, let's be truthful here: In landing on that carrier, Bush put himself at greater risk of life and limb than perhaps any President has been in during living memory, barring assassination attempts. And it's not recklessness; it's a carefully calculated way to convey familiarity and confidence in a very crucial time. Many Presidents are criticized as what we now hear to be "chickenhawks"-- people willing to send other people to fight wars, but who aren't willing to go and fight themselves. Bush himself has taken barbs-- a pale attempt at mirroring the draft-dodger accusations against Clinton-- for "dodging danger" in Vietnam by flying in the Texas Air Guard instead of going to the front lines. Well, the only way Bush could have dispelled that criticism any more effectively is if he rode into Nasiriyah standing on the front of an M-1 Abrams, waving a Kabar and shouting commands through FO gear.
Is this disingenuous? Is he ignoring the rest of America while pandering to the military? Somehow I don't think so. If he's shrewd enough to acquaint himself with soldier slang like "the God of 2.0", which apparently the audience ate up with more gusto than how the Germans received "Ich bin ein Berliner", then he's intelligent enough to understand that the military does not represent the entire country when it comes time for elections. He knows full well that he'll have to turn his attention to the domestic campaign trail before too long.
But first things first. Right now, the biggest reason why this war is no Vietnam is that Bush is no Nixon-- or Johnson. And the men know it.
UPDATE: I also heard him a few days ago telling a bunch of Cuban-Americans that Cuba será pronto libre. His pronunciation wasn't that of a linguist-- he'd clearly rehearsed it-- but it did sound more natural than "Ik bin aahhyn buh-linnah". I think this is as close as we're going to get to the grand old days when politicians were expected to speak at least five languages fluently.
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