Hagiography and seeing the possibilities.
Yesterday, Erza wrote something really telling: (and speaking of hagiography, I worry this sounds like "suck up to Ezra Klein week" here at Liberalism Without Cynicism, but I really was struck by this posting):
Oliver had a good post on this, but it bears repeating. George W. Bush is not up to the task of leadership. That's not said as a criticism, actually -- I am not up to the task of dancing, or running marathons. We all have failings, and Bush's essential flaw is an inability to project himself, an inability to grow in dimension during a crisis, an inability to sense that catastrophes serve as opportunities for strengthening the American community. I dislike Bush for mean-spiritedness, for his incompetence, for his smugness. But I deplore him for his smallness. That the 2004 election was a 51-49 affair is shocking. Had John McCain won in 2000, his response to 9/11 would have toasted the Democratic party for the next 20 years. Had Al Gore been in office, his leadership in the moments after would've changed the world, or at least the international community. Both of them would have brought Americans together. But Bush simply invited us to malls, wedged us apart, snookered us into a disastrous war that didn't need to be fought. For a President to hold office during a crisis of that magnitude and do as little, both socially and politically, as Bush did is almost unprecedented.
Yeah. The federal response to Katrina has been appalling, and getting more appalling the longer the sitatuation drags on. Michael Tomasky has more on just how pathetic and formulaic Bush's initial reaction to what is likely the worst natural disaster in American history was at the symbolic level: Bush didn't want to interrupt his schedule for the disaster and didn't for almost a full 24 hours after the initial evacuation, long after the first levee had broken. And Bush's resistence to facing up to a change of plans was perfectly symbolic of what actually came to pass in the federal response to the humanitarian disaster: the lethargy, the confusion, the general cluelessness of the people in charge. Everyday, you think it must be the end, that the last of them are being picked up, that Chertoff isn't just spinning this time. But, everyday, people are still out there, waiting in the SuperDome. It's been five days now.
But, as Ezra points out, this isn't anything new for Bush. Though his reaction wasn't as slow in the the aftermath of 911 (My Pet Goat aside); the telltale signs were just as daming: the "Bush Doctrine" (personalising the conflict), the "New Pearl Harbor" diary entry (soaking up the drama); turning immediately to thoughts of Iraq (fitting it into his pre-defined set of priorities); standing on that pile of rubble three days later and yelling through the blowhorn. All the signs, all the symbolism, was there then too of the clueless machoism, the aggressive, blundering push to redefine history that was to come.
Can you honestly imagine any Democrat doing any of the things that followed -- trolling around for an Iraq connection within the first 48 hours of an unrelated attack? Working through innuendo to instill terrified Americans with a sense dread over an (im)possible nuclear scenario originating in Iraq (just when terrified Americans were ripe for such a message)? Declaring "mission accomplished" in full military regalia while Americans were still dying on foreign soil? Blatantly, overtly alienating European allies, often by having low-ranking officials or aides leak rude comments about our lack of interest in their views? Saying in a 2003 joint appearance with Kofi Annan that "We gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in"? Having his vice president attend a Holocaust memorial in a knit ski cap? That's just off the top of my head. Suppose, just imagine, for one second that Al Gore had done some combination of the above things. He would have lost the 2004 election, if he made it through the primary, by 20 points. There wouldn't have been a commentator, liberal, conservative or centrist who would have defended him. We all would have been embarrassed to call ourselves Democrats.
But what was Bush's great schtick, the defining characteristic on which his team engineered and won their re-election (cleanly this time, more or less)? Leadership. Steady leadership. Steady leadership in times of change. And the Republicans were very loud, and very proud in proclaiming it.
This is more than just the emporer having no clothes. The emporer is flashing your grandmother. Ezra is right that Bush is small. He's so small and so hapless I almost feel uncomfortable for him. But he was a small man who let his backers and advisors convince him that he was in fact a very big man, a chosen man, a man who could change history. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too... And it's almost painful to see Bush and everyone who else bought it realizing the truth about the terrible, pathetic of-this-world mismanagement of government this Admin has brought about: of which the downsizing and handing off of FEMA to various lobbyists is just a minor part. Even CNN was openly speculating this week about the horror of the richest county on earth being unable to plan for the security of, to save the lives, of its poorest members.
But what's awful politically is how little anybody, even now, thinks about the alternatives. Abstracting from McCain (not that McCain would have won in 2000), what Ezra writes about Gore is correct. Well, actually, I don't know if it is, and neither does Ezra. It's just hypothesis. But I actually believe that it's correct. I believe that Gore and Lieberman would have used 911 as a pretext for integrating the military by sexual orientation -- because that's the way to show American life is about: pluralism, tolerance. I believe they would have brought back the BTU tax from 1993 because it was the most broad-based way to share the costs of energy externalities. I believe they would have forced the inspectors back into Iraq and raised liberal hackles with their tough talk at Saddam... but left it at that. I believe they would have talked to us seriously about energy, that they would have given us Malaise without malaise. And I believe they would have wrapped it all in the same sort of ultra-patriotic generic quasi-religious claptrap that was Lieberman's specialty on the campaign trail. But we wouldn't have minded so much as we thought, given the circumstances. I remember the last time I thought all this: it was while reading Leon Feurth' NYT op-ed on the aftermath of the tsunami back in January on all the wisbang, underfunded programs they'd thought up back in the 90s to deal with similar disasters. Feurth and Gore are very strange and you have to put up with that; it's not everyone's cup of tea. But there's something intriguing, and really, really sad, about seeing just a fragment of the possibilities that open up when you get beyond the current smallness, the current smallmindedness of government, the tiny little conceptual box we're trapped in when thinking about how things could be.
And it's not just Gore. During the 2004 campaign, I believed that John Kerry genuinely cared about the poor, that he was deadly genuine when he asked at the Convention last year "What does it mean when people are huddled in blankets in the cold, sleeping in Lafayette Park, on the doorstep of the White House itself, and the number of families living in poverty has risen by 3 million in the last four years?" Aren't those really the very sort of questions that lie unanswered behind what's going on in Lousiana right now? John Edwards is asking them too. Even Bill Clinton, the Democratic leader of recent times I'm most ambivolent about, never struck me as the charming chameleon his critics on both the left and the right imagined, but a genuine populist (not all populism has results we like) who tried his hardest to meet the popualar (conservative) demands of the electorate while moving the country forward and preparing it to meet crises: the difference in FEMA between 1999 and 2005 is testiment enough to that.
That's why I'm a Democrat. Not everyone will agree; the Dems are not a leftwing party and not always an effective anything party -- and that's a failing shared in part by all the Dems I mentioned above. But I know from my time at Kos that there are other Democrats who feel something similar what I do. But, unlike the Republicans, unlike the Bushies, we just don't do hagiography (though maybe we're learning, a little bit) and these are the practical results. Our candidates end up looking vaguely ridiculous, unloved, unimportant in the big scheme of things. And as a result, nobody -- not the pundits and not the voters -- really thinks about alternatives; there's almost no popular rumbling, no whispered message in the zeitgeist, that things would be better if our guys had been in charge, not just of the tragedy's aftermath, but of the popular moment that led up to it and defined it. And their guy, who should never have gotten close to the presidency in the first place, who just hasn't got the aptitude, the broadness, the creativity to lead or even really to fake it, somehow got passed off as a Great Man for several long years.
That's the power of True Believing, of hagiography. They can do it and we, for some reason, can't. It might be the morning after the bender in America right now. But it's been far too long in coming.
Oliver had a good post on this, but it bears repeating. George W. Bush is not up to the task of leadership. That's not said as a criticism, actually -- I am not up to the task of dancing, or running marathons. We all have failings, and Bush's essential flaw is an inability to project himself, an inability to grow in dimension during a crisis, an inability to sense that catastrophes serve as opportunities for strengthening the American community. I dislike Bush for mean-spiritedness, for his incompetence, for his smugness. But I deplore him for his smallness. That the 2004 election was a 51-49 affair is shocking. Had John McCain won in 2000, his response to 9/11 would have toasted the Democratic party for the next 20 years. Had Al Gore been in office, his leadership in the moments after would've changed the world, or at least the international community. Both of them would have brought Americans together. But Bush simply invited us to malls, wedged us apart, snookered us into a disastrous war that didn't need to be fought. For a President to hold office during a crisis of that magnitude and do as little, both socially and politically, as Bush did is almost unprecedented.
Yeah. The federal response to Katrina has been appalling, and getting more appalling the longer the sitatuation drags on. Michael Tomasky has more on just how pathetic and formulaic Bush's initial reaction to what is likely the worst natural disaster in American history was at the symbolic level: Bush didn't want to interrupt his schedule for the disaster and didn't for almost a full 24 hours after the initial evacuation, long after the first levee had broken. And Bush's resistence to facing up to a change of plans was perfectly symbolic of what actually came to pass in the federal response to the humanitarian disaster: the lethargy, the confusion, the general cluelessness of the people in charge. Everyday, you think it must be the end, that the last of them are being picked up, that Chertoff isn't just spinning this time. But, everyday, people are still out there, waiting in the SuperDome. It's been five days now.
But, as Ezra points out, this isn't anything new for Bush. Though his reaction wasn't as slow in the the aftermath of 911 (My Pet Goat aside); the telltale signs were just as daming: the "Bush Doctrine" (personalising the conflict), the "New Pearl Harbor" diary entry (soaking up the drama); turning immediately to thoughts of Iraq (fitting it into his pre-defined set of priorities); standing on that pile of rubble three days later and yelling through the blowhorn. All the signs, all the symbolism, was there then too of the clueless machoism, the aggressive, blundering push to redefine history that was to come.
Can you honestly imagine any Democrat doing any of the things that followed -- trolling around for an Iraq connection within the first 48 hours of an unrelated attack? Working through innuendo to instill terrified Americans with a sense dread over an (im)possible nuclear scenario originating in Iraq (just when terrified Americans were ripe for such a message)? Declaring "mission accomplished" in full military regalia while Americans were still dying on foreign soil? Blatantly, overtly alienating European allies, often by having low-ranking officials or aides leak rude comments about our lack of interest in their views? Saying in a 2003 joint appearance with Kofi Annan that "We gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in"? Having his vice president attend a Holocaust memorial in a knit ski cap? That's just off the top of my head. Suppose, just imagine, for one second that Al Gore had done some combination of the above things. He would have lost the 2004 election, if he made it through the primary, by 20 points. There wouldn't have been a commentator, liberal, conservative or centrist who would have defended him. We all would have been embarrassed to call ourselves Democrats.
But what was Bush's great schtick, the defining characteristic on which his team engineered and won their re-election (cleanly this time, more or less)? Leadership. Steady leadership. Steady leadership in times of change. And the Republicans were very loud, and very proud in proclaiming it.
This is more than just the emporer having no clothes. The emporer is flashing your grandmother. Ezra is right that Bush is small. He's so small and so hapless I almost feel uncomfortable for him. But he was a small man who let his backers and advisors convince him that he was in fact a very big man, a chosen man, a man who could change history. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too... And it's almost painful to see Bush and everyone who else bought it realizing the truth about the terrible, pathetic of-this-world mismanagement of government this Admin has brought about: of which the downsizing and handing off of FEMA to various lobbyists is just a minor part. Even CNN was openly speculating this week about the horror of the richest county on earth being unable to plan for the security of, to save the lives, of its poorest members.
But what's awful politically is how little anybody, even now, thinks about the alternatives. Abstracting from McCain (not that McCain would have won in 2000), what Ezra writes about Gore is correct. Well, actually, I don't know if it is, and neither does Ezra. It's just hypothesis. But I actually believe that it's correct. I believe that Gore and Lieberman would have used 911 as a pretext for integrating the military by sexual orientation -- because that's the way to show American life is about: pluralism, tolerance. I believe they would have brought back the BTU tax from 1993 because it was the most broad-based way to share the costs of energy externalities. I believe they would have forced the inspectors back into Iraq and raised liberal hackles with their tough talk at Saddam... but left it at that. I believe they would have talked to us seriously about energy, that they would have given us Malaise without malaise. And I believe they would have wrapped it all in the same sort of ultra-patriotic generic quasi-religious claptrap that was Lieberman's specialty on the campaign trail. But we wouldn't have minded so much as we thought, given the circumstances. I remember the last time I thought all this: it was while reading Leon Feurth' NYT op-ed on the aftermath of the tsunami back in January on all the wisbang, underfunded programs they'd thought up back in the 90s to deal with similar disasters. Feurth and Gore are very strange and you have to put up with that; it's not everyone's cup of tea. But there's something intriguing, and really, really sad, about seeing just a fragment of the possibilities that open up when you get beyond the current smallness, the current smallmindedness of government, the tiny little conceptual box we're trapped in when thinking about how things could be.
And it's not just Gore. During the 2004 campaign, I believed that John Kerry genuinely cared about the poor, that he was deadly genuine when he asked at the Convention last year "What does it mean when people are huddled in blankets in the cold, sleeping in Lafayette Park, on the doorstep of the White House itself, and the number of families living in poverty has risen by 3 million in the last four years?" Aren't those really the very sort of questions that lie unanswered behind what's going on in Lousiana right now? John Edwards is asking them too. Even Bill Clinton, the Democratic leader of recent times I'm most ambivolent about, never struck me as the charming chameleon his critics on both the left and the right imagined, but a genuine populist (not all populism has results we like) who tried his hardest to meet the popualar (conservative) demands of the electorate while moving the country forward and preparing it to meet crises: the difference in FEMA between 1999 and 2005 is testiment enough to that.
That's why I'm a Democrat. Not everyone will agree; the Dems are not a leftwing party and not always an effective anything party -- and that's a failing shared in part by all the Dems I mentioned above. But I know from my time at Kos that there are other Democrats who feel something similar what I do. But, unlike the Republicans, unlike the Bushies, we just don't do hagiography (though maybe we're learning, a little bit) and these are the practical results. Our candidates end up looking vaguely ridiculous, unloved, unimportant in the big scheme of things. And as a result, nobody -- not the pundits and not the voters -- really thinks about alternatives; there's almost no popular rumbling, no whispered message in the zeitgeist, that things would be better if our guys had been in charge, not just of the tragedy's aftermath, but of the popular moment that led up to it and defined it. And their guy, who should never have gotten close to the presidency in the first place, who just hasn't got the aptitude, the broadness, the creativity to lead or even really to fake it, somehow got passed off as a Great Man for several long years.
That's the power of True Believing, of hagiography. They can do it and we, for some reason, can't. It might be the morning after the bender in America right now. But it's been far too long in coming.
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