Bush has turned a referendum on himself into a referendum on the other guy

Originally published in The New Yorker September 13, 2004

Copyright 2004 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.  

BUSHSPEAK;
The President's vernacular style.

BY: PHILIP GOUREVITCH

The roadkill on the highway west of El Paso, our southernmost interstate, is mostly jackrabbits and coyotes. For miles, the blacktop is hemmed by cattle pens, and the smell of sunbaked dung sweetens the air. Beneath the near-hundred-degree heat of a cloudless late-summer sky, the scrubby West Texas landscape is ash-dry, except in the startlingly green oases created by irrigation or the flat muddy cuts of the Rio Grande. Everything about the place-"out here," as people say, or "down here"-announces itself, totemically, as belonging to America's southwestern border and seems to imply a set of choices and attitudes, a particular way of life. But those choices and attitudes do not translate as obviously as might be imagined into political inclinations.

While George W. Bush can count on his home state on Election Day, the arithmetic changes twenty minutes out of El Paso, where the interstate slips into New Mexico and twenty minutes later slices through the city of Las Cruces. New Mexico was the most closely divided state in the 2000 election, rejecting Bush in favor of Al Gore by just three hundred and sixty-six votes, and Las Cruces, which has a huge state university and a large Mexican-American population, is predominantly Democratic. So it was to Las Cruces that Bush flew from his ranch on the last Thursday of August, to commence a week-long campaign swing leading up to his speech at the Republican Convention in New York.

At eight-fifteen in the morning, the time ticket-holders to the rally had been warned that the doors would close, and an hour before Bush was to take the stage, a local congressman, Steve Pearce, was warming up the overwhelmingly white crowd, denouncing John Kerry as an unreconstructed enemy sympathizer cut from Jane Fonda's cloth, and praising Bush's leadership. "There's lots of wonderful things going on in Iraq," he said, "and the media refuses to cover them." A Texas swing band called the Desperados took over for a while, cranking out "San Antonio Rose," "Cherokee Maid," and "Faded Love," and then Pearce resumed his harangue, characterizing the Democratic Party as subservient to the United Nations and hostile to the notion of individual responsibility. "If poverty causes crime, then affluence causes kindness, and you know in your heart that's not true," he said. Pearce got the biggest cheers for an untruth of his own: "There is one candidate who will keep the words 'under God' in our pledge." In fact, this is not an issue in the campaign, since both candidates oppose removing the words, and neither would be in a position to protect them if a court should find them unconstitutional.

The Desperados kept the arena awake with the song "Take Me Back to Tulsa" until a giant video screen lit up with a live shot of the Presidential motorcade-a trio of armored limousines, led by motorcycle cops and flanked by squad cars-pulling into the parking lot outside. When Bush appeared in person, moments later, he seemed surprisingly ordinary. "I'm here to ask for the vote," he told the audience. "I believe it's important to get out and ask for the vote. I believe it's important to travel this great state and the country, talkin' about where I intend to lead the country." He made this sound like an original idea, and perhaps a controversial one, and the way he repeated the words "I believe" carried an air of defiant conviction: I'm not here offering myself to you because that's how it's done in a democracy but because that's just how I am, and I don't give a damn who says different.

He wore no tie, and his sleeves were rolled up, and the simplicity of the proposition, the easy conversational forthrightness, seemed so natural, so obvious and reassuring, that it was easy to forget, as he wound on through his stump speech, that he had promised to lay out a plan for the future. He offered no such plan, or even any new initiatives. He just declared the past four years a success, and said that more and better was to come. What was the alternative? John Kerry? Bush spends a good deal of time on the stump deriding his rival, and the rest of the time he projects the attitude of a man who is running unopposed-which he could be forgiven for thinking if the election depended simply on who is the better campaigner.

Bush campaigns with the eager self-delight of a natural ham. There's an appealing physicality about him. When he says he wants your vote, he does not just mouth the words but follows them through with his entire body, rising to his toes, tilting toward you yearningly. When he works his way along the edge of the stage, waving, shaking hands, he has the concentration of an athlete in the thrall of his game. He seems to hold nothing back. He reaches for the hands around him, tipping so far forward that it appears, in the frozen fraction of a second captured in photographs, that he has lost his balance. He twists, and stoops, and spins, and stops abruptly to wave, and the raised hand seems to lift the rest of him with it, up and forward. Bush is said to be charming, and polls show that Americans tend to find him more likable than his policies, but one does not even have to like him to admire how truly at home he appears in his body.

He has a repertoire of stock poses and expressions, as does any professional performer, but the freedom of his movements is striking. Flip through snapshots of him, and you'll find any number that catch him in a bizarre or comical position. The mobility of his face leaves him open to lampooning, not least because of its simian modelling, which is underscored by his affectation of an equally simian gait-the dangle-armed swagger, like a knuckle-walker startled to find himself suddenly upright. But even when he looks foolish, or simply coarse, Bush is never less than an expressive presence.

The same can be said of his language. He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence. Although Bush is no intellectual, and proud of it, he is quick and clever, and, for all his notorious malapropisms, abuses of syntax, and manglings or reinventions of vocabulary, his intelligence is-if not especially literate-acutely verbal. His words, in transcription, might seem mindless, incoherent, or unintentionally hilarious ("I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family"; "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we"), but it is pretty plain what he means. "Even when we don't agree, you know what I believe and where I stand," he reminded the nation at Madison Square Garden, during his acceptance of the Republican nomination.

Bush's top speechwriter, Michael Gerson, is regarded as a master of his trade. His speeches are composed of short, declarative sentences packed with substance. While John Kerry can speak rousingly for whole paragraphs without saying anything precise or concrete, Bush rarely puts ten words together in a major address without taking a position, passing a judgment, or proclaiming a purpose. He is less concise when unscripted, or-as on the stump-only loosely tethered to a text, but when he's ad-libbing he makes up for whatever tightness he lacks with an emotional appeal, seeking and generally finding a level of connection to his supporters that eludes his rival entirely. Bush's gift in this regard is a function of his lack of polish: the clipped nature of his phraseology, the touch of twang, the hard consonants, the nasal vowels, the dropped conjunctions and slurred or swallowed suffixes.

"I'm sorry Laura's not here," he told the breakfast-hour crowd in Las Cruces, and they moaned in sympathy. "I understand," he said, and got a big laugh. "I kissed her goodbye in Crawford this morning and said, 'I've got to go to work.' " More laughter. "She said, You git over to New Mexico and you remind 'em that her kinfolk were raised right here down the road in Anthony. I'm proud of Laura. She's a great mom, a wonderful wife." Loud yips and applause. He continued in a deadpan: "I'll give you some reasons why I think you ought to put me back in. But perhaps the most important one of all's so Laura's the first lady for four more years."

To watch Bush work a room, however cheesy his salesmanship and however canned his hucksterism, is to behold a master of the American vernacular, that form of expression which eschews slickness and makes a virtue of the speaker's limitations-an artfulness that depends on artlessness, an eloquence that depends on inflection and emphasis. His speeches rely on the same stagger-stacking of phrases and refrains that characterizes popular songs and sermons. "We've been through a lot together in the last four years," he told the Las Cruces crowd. "We've accomplished a great deal. But there's only one reason to look backward at the record. And that is who best to lead us forward. That's what I want to talk about. Want to remind you we have much at stake in this election." He began gathering momentum in a steady crescendo that he let build until he was cut off by applause: "We have more to do to move America forward. We have more to do to create jobs and improve our schools. We have more to do to fight terror and protect the homeland. We have more to do t'spread freedom and peace. We've made much progress. I'm here to tell you. I'm ready for the job. I'm ready to accomplish it all."

Bush's voice has a surprising range: he can get a shouting attack going, and he can fall suddenly quiet to create emphasis and declare his seriousness. But the most effective quality is the harsh staccato that overcomes him when he speaks about his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the boundless, all-encompassing, and perhaps eternal war on terror. He acquires a drill sergeant's punctiliousness-pro-noun-cing ev-er-y syl-lab-le, hit-ting ev-er-y con-son-ant, singing out the sibilants, and bending words, drawing them out, or isolating them between stark silences, with some of the weird sonic zing of Bob Dylan's diction. He leans in over the microphone, and to make no mistake about his message he reads from a script: "See, our-our fu-ture de-pends on our willing-ness to lead in the world. If America shows uncertainty and weak-ness in this decade, the world will drift toward"-pause-"tragedy"-pause. "This will not hap-pen on my watch." Bush's right hand, held out flat, beats steadily up and down, patting the lectern in accompaniment to his robotic rhythm. He is nothing if not insistent.

The best sendup of Bushspeak was published by the Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles this spring. It was a drawing called "George W. Bush Press Conference Refrigerator Magnet Set," and showed an icebox door arrayed with a patchwork of words and phrases: "I want to say / I mean / clearly / the situation was / a / tough week / tough / dangerous / because the / terror / terrorism / threat was / a nation / that was dangerous / because of / weapons / programs / activities / we're still looking / but even / though / I was briefed / a lot / steadfast / and strong / about / historical / killer / terrorist / suiciders / who would / fly it into buildings / which was / a gathering threat / in / easy hindsight / that / empty words / would embolden / dangerous people / hidden in a turkey farm / where / I was tired of swatting flies / so / I want to be clear."

Bush has created a language of his own-as austere and strange as that of David Mamet or Samuel Beckett, with whom he shares a taste for speaking in spare absolutes that can sound simultaneously profound and absurd. "The world changed on a terrible September morning, and since that day we have changed the world," he said, and, as he enumerated the changes, he kept returning to a refrain: "And America and the world are safer." In Iraq, he said, "I saw a threat." September 11th had taught him not to let a threat materialize. Congress and the U.N. agreed with him that Saddam Hussein had to be brought to heel. "The world spoke," Bush said. Saddam remained defiant. America acted. "Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision," he proclaimed, and with that he launched into an attack on Kerry's shifting positions on Iraq.

Bush's performance on the stump is more a rap than a speech, a sequence of talking points strung together by applause lines. In style and substance, his discourse is saturated in churchiness: he touts the rights of the unborn, pooh-poohs same-sex marriage, speaks of marshalling the "armies of compassion" and transforming America into a "culture of responsibility" and an "ownership society" by changing "one heart and soul, one conscience at a time." But, for all his God talk, he is remarkably lacking in humility. No fault, no blame, no regret, no room for shame attends him as he goes about changing the world. Nor does he appear to entertain the possibility that the changes he is imposing could be anything but improvements. To hear him tell it, the economy is terrific, public education is thriving, health care is better than ever, terrorists are on the run, democracy is spreading throughout the Middle East, and everywhere America is living up to what he describes as its "calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom." Because Bush does not appear able to recognize his own errors, much less admit them, he is incapable of self-correction. Indeed, he boasts tirelessly of his resolve and steadfastness, making a virtue of rigidity. Like it or lump it.

Bush's motorcade withdrew to Las Cruces's tiny desert airfield at mid-morning; he was off to give the same performance at rallies in Farmington and Albuquerque before flying home to the White House for the night. Not far from Air Force One, on the tarmac, a Kerry-Edwards campaign plane waited for John Edwards, who was holding a rally at noon in the historic town square of Mesilla, just a few miles from where the Bush crowd was dispersing. The last time that Republican and Democratic rallies coincided in Mesilla, in August of 1871, sharp whiskey and sharp words resulted in brawls and gunplay that left nine men dead and as many as fifty wounded. The memory of that massacre provides a heartening reminder that there is a good deal of both hype and plain ignorance behind the claim, widely upheld among the political classes this year, that we are in the throes of the bitterest, most polarizing electoral contest in American history. Sure, as both the Bush and the Kerry camps keep saying, much is at stake. Sure, the race has become plenty ugly. But what makes it most discouraging is not the divisiveness but the falseness and the foolishness of so much of the debate-and, thus far, it is Bush, the self-styled heir to such great statesmen as Churchill and Truman, who has contributed most to lowering the tone.

Four years ago, Bush ran for President as a champion of compassion at home and humility abroad. After the September 11th attacks, he recast himself as a man of action, a warrior, whose basic message to the world is: They messed with the wrong guy. In a video clip shown at the Republican Convention, he said, "I think the best part of this job is to set in motion big changes of history-it's unbelievably exciting to be in a position to do that." He has done so by force of arms, and also by force of words. For Bush, rhetoric is reality, and he operates as if things were as he says they are. If reality does not conform, he remains undeterred, and on message-as with his insistence that even if he'd known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would have invaded and occupied the place anyway. Indeed, as his Presidency has progressed, and his policies have failed to create the circumstances he has proclaimed-whether in regard to the economy, education, prescription drugs, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, nation-building in Afghanistan, or war and occupation in Iraq-the gap between his grandiose, self-glorifying rhetoric and our anxious and unsettling reality has grown steadily wider.

That gap was on full display last week at Madison Square Garden, where the Republicans devoted more time to heaping scorn-and a good deal of calumny-on John Kerry than to laying out their vision for four more years of Bush. Although the President himself showed up, according to tradition, only on the final night, the Convention was the ultimate festival of Bush rhetoric. The agenda, which was designed to create an air of Party unity, reflected an effort to appeal to predominantly moderate undecided voters and also to rally the party's conservative base. Cabinet members most intimately identified with controversial Bush policies (Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz) were nowhere to be seen. Instead, prime-time hours were given over to figures better known for being ideologically out of step with the President than for hanging around with him (John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger), who found common ground in their enthusiasm for Bush as a war leader.

It is not apparent that most Americans think of themselves as living in a nation at war, or that a sense of being engaged in a struggle to the death with an unseen but all-threatening enemy is the defining political experience of our time. But that has been the premise of the Bush presidency since the day when, as he insists on putting it, "everything changed," and that was the dominant theme of the Bush Convention. Indeed, the pageant at the Garden was as much a tribute to September 11th as it was to Bush himself-and the commemoration of that date had a lugubrious, cultish quality.

During the culture wars of the early nineties, Republicans deplored the bullying political correctness that came from the intertwining of victimology and identity politics, and yet in the construct of recent history promoted by the White House, and by speaker after speaker and video after video at Madison Square Garden, America's great wound was featured as a sort of national treasure-the ultimate and all-justifying source of legitimacy of the Bush Presidency. So the constant invocations of mass death and devastation were proffered to the conventioneers and their television audience not only as a bad thing but also, perversely, as something to cherish, even to celebrate, as a source of unity and purpose. Giuliani, in whose life story September 11th is a very good very bad day, set the tone on opening night by recycling the bullying, jingoist credo that Bush originally extracted from Ground Zero: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Nobody needed to be told where that put Kerry and his supporters, especially after Zell Miller, the bilious, hatchet-faced senator from Georgia, delivered a keynote rant in which he declared it tantamount to treason for Kerry to campaign against Bush.

So it went: blood and fire and God and country and "Amazing Grace." It was a proper war party at the Garden, charged with the language of Christian martyrology, and Bush could not have been more at home on closing night, when he strode out on a catwalk that had been built to lead him to a special altar in the round, which placed him in the middle of the floor, amid the masses, "a man of the people." That was the idea, anyway. In fact, he looked about as populist there as a Roman emperor, and he was not at ease. The burden upon him, and upon his speech, was to explain to Americans what he has in mind to do for them if he gets a second term. It was not a memorable speech, and it did not quite answer that question. It was an expanded, beefed-up version of his standard stump speech, with many of the same punch lines. His domestic agenda was a grab bag of mostly recycled ideas for reforming Social Security, health-care policy, education, and the tax code. He was vague about how any of these things might be accomplished, much less paid for, and although he enunciated with zealous care every word that appeared on the teleprompters, he read too slowly, without any particular conviction, until he got to the final pages of the speech, which dealt with September 11th, terror, and war. Then he came alive.

The words Osama bin Laden, North Korea, and Iran had hardly been spoken at the Convention, and they did not pass Bush's lips. About Iraq's troubles since Saddam's capture he was equally silent. Yet he vowed to make the world safer, and, as he waxed abstract, that prospect seemed to move him. "Freedom is not America's gift to the world," he intoned, as he does at every campaign stop. "It is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world." He spoke of "the resurrection of New York City," and how in the future visitors to Ground Zero will say, "Here buildings fell, and here a nation rose." And then, a few moments later, the balloons dropped, the confetti blizzard blew, the music swelled, and out came Laura, out came the Cheneys, out came all the kids and grandkids, and, love them or hate them, everybody watching seemed to agree that the Republicans had just had a hell of a successful Convention.

Of course, the same was said about the Democrats a month earlier. But Bush and his crew had pretty much wiped away Kerry's advantage, even before they gathered in New York. They had fought him dirty, with the lying Swift Boat Veterans' ads, and they'd fought him mean, caricaturing and taunting him, jabbing and lashing at him with sharp tongues. They'd ganged up and piled on, and they'd made no apologies. In fact, they'd enjoyed every minute of it.

"Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called walking," Bush said at the Garden. "Now and then, I come across as a little too blunt-and for that we can all thank the white-haired lady sitting up there." He indicated his mother. That was the joke in his speech, the self-deprecating part, but the President wasn't kidding. Kicking ass is just his nature. And, while he had been effectively tied with or trailing his challenger all year, and still was behind on many issues and in many states, an early post-Convention poll showed him opening a national lead beyond the margin of error. Even so, both candidates must now recognize that neither of them inspires any great enthusiasm in a majority of the electorate. Neither can expect to win on his merits. Rather, for each the best hope is to make the other one lose-and, for the moment at least, Bush had succeeded in turning a referendum on himself into a referendum on the other guy.