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.