Religions > Atheism > Bush: Dumb Hunches & Religious Feelings Better Than Hard Facts - In Iraq: 1092 US Troops Dead, 7532 Wounded
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"The Lone Weasel" |
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17 Oct 2004 12:44:44 PM |
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Bush: Dumb Hunches & Religious Feelings Better Than Hard Facts - In Iraq: 1092 US Troops Dead, 7532 Wounded |
October 17, 2004
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and
a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me
recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the
Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that
conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one
raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists
and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and
religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a
light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to
Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort
of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to
do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described
libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for
traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went
on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about
Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you
have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're
extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them,
because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with
inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly
believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that
overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is
to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.''
Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on
faith.''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March
just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe
Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was
in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,''
he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many
concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the
peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of
the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush,
Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the
United States was on the right course and that all was well.
'''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when
you know you don't know the facts?'''
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's
shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room
grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't
good enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to
make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an
extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity
and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top
deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine
Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq --
have been told for years when they requested explanations for
many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed
to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he
relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of
state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a
deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that
has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble
the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W.
Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic
''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that
their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first
presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John
Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's
certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can
be certain and be wrong.''
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the
temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and
religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith
asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and
abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal
journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has
also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The
president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers,
his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican
Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a
creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its
rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were
surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar
expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who
have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since
9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of
doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question
him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the
powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved
mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided
the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the
day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In
meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case.
And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose
faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these
remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election
effort in New Jersey.)
The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties
of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall
between organized religion and political authority. But
suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush --
both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily,
inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the
faith-based presidency.
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model
that has been enormously effective at, among other things,
keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a
kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the
late winter and spring, with revelations from the former
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from
the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted
O'Neill saying that Bush was like ''a blind man in a room full
of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to the White House.
But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans
calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's
faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon
for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some
were willing to talk because they said they thought George W.
Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if
he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence
fatigue -- public servants, some with vast experience, who feel
they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era
children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence
still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After
many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications
director, said in a letter that the president and those around
him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.
Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken
with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the
president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others
focused on Bush's substantial interpersonal gifts as a
compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities.
Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat,
are worried about something other than his native intelligence.
''He's plenty smart enough to do the job,'' Levin said. ''It's
his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles
me.'' But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe
at the president's preternatural certainty and wonderment about
its source.
There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I
am able to piece together and tell for the record.
In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a
few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans
and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the
United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and
Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion
that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing
peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone
agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France
and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the
Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born
Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust
survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian
countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to
describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an
ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force
of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly,
several people in the room recall.
''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said.
''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly
reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said
Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral,
without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside,
that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the
country in the event of invasion.
Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no
army.''
The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.
A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses
gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries
for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos
and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said,
with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''
This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval
Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal
Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who
meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos,
through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his
not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)
This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open
dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent
value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It
could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and,
just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more
vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the
terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one
of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said
any number of times on the campaign trail, ''By remaining
resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''
He didn't always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush,
just as he was ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim
Wallis, a man with the added advantage of having deep acuity
about the struggles between fact and faith. Wallis, an
evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners -- a
progressive organization of advocates for social justice -- was
asked during the transition to help pull together a diverse
group of members of the clergy to talk about faith and poverty
with the new president-elect.
In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church
in Austin, Tex., with 30 or so clergy members and asked, ''How
do I speak to the soul of the nation?'' He listened as each
guest articulated a vision of what might be. The afternoon
hours passed. No one wanted to leave. People rose from their
chairs and wandered the room, huddling in groups, conversing
passionately. In one cluster, Bush and Wallis talked of their
journeys.
''I've never lived around poor people,'' Wallis remembers Bush
saying. ''I don't know what they think. I really don't know
what they think. I'm a white Republican guy who doesn't get it.
How do I get it?''
Wallis recalls replying, ''You need to listen to the poor and
those who live and work with poor people.''
Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and said,
''I want you to hear this.'' A month later, an almost identical
line -- ''many in our country do not know the pain of poverty,
but we can listen to those who do'' -- ended up in the
inaugural address.
That was an earlier Bush, one rather more open and conversant,
matching his impulsiveness with a can-do attitude and seemingly
unafraid of engaging with a diverse group. The president has an
array of interpersonal gifts that fit well with this
fearlessness -- a headlong, unalloyed quality, best suited to
ranging among different types of people, searching for the
outlines of what will take shape as principles.
Yet this strong suit, an improvisational gift, has long been
forced to wrestle with its ''left brain'' opposite -- a
struggle, across 30 years, with the critical and analytical
skills so prized in America's professional class. In terms of
intellectual faculties, that has been the ongoing battle for
this talented man, first visible during the lackluster years at
Yale and five years of drift through his 20's -- a time when
peers were busy building credentials in law, business or
medicine.
Biden, who early on became disenchanted with Bush's grasp of
foreign-policy issues and is among John Kerry's closest Senate
friends, has spent a lot of time trying to size up the
president. ''Most successful people are good at identifying,
very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing
themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us average
Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on
our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they
might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to
do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or
friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has
served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He
never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''
Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that's just a
catch phrase -- he never ran anything of consequence in the
private sector. The M.B.A. president would be more accurate: he
did, after all, graduate from Harvard Business School. And some
who have worked under him in the White House and know about
business have spotted a strange business-school time warp. It's
as if a 1975 graduate from H.B.S. -- one who had little chance
to season theory with practice during the past few decades of
change in corporate America -- has simply been dropped into the
most challenging management job in the world.
One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems
of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the ''case
cracker'' problem. The case studies are static, generally a
snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various
''solutions'' students proffer, and then defend in class
against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives.
They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something
H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms,
learn in their first few years in business. They discover,
often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows
and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility,
rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant
reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful
second-guessing.
George W. Bush, who went off to Texas to be an oil wildcatter,
never had a chance to learn these lessons about the power of
nuanced, fact-based analysis. The small oil companies he ran
tended to lose money; much of their value was as tax shelters.
(The investors were often friends of his father's.) Later, with
the Texas Rangers baseball team, he would act as an able front
man but never really as a boss.
Instead of learning the limitations of his Harvard training,
what George W. Bush learned instead during these fitful years
were lessons about faith and its particular efficacy. It was in
1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush
says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that
point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his
career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those
close to Bush about a faith ''intervention'' of sorts at the
Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but
here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W.,
drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's.
George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along
the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then
the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who
came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in
probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon
born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and
wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was
saved.
His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but
faith was clearly having little impact on his broken career.
Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn't do much
for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years after receiving
salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from
one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come
from this period. It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing
director and cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the Washington-
based investment firm that is one of the town's most powerful
institutions and a longtime business home for the president's
father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken
private and established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle
investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former
Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.
Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension
managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek
approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be
on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job.
.. . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't
think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much
value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the
meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of
jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of
said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure
this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else.
Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the
board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said:
'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I
don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign
from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see
him again.''
Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair's board. Around
this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush's possible
candidacy for the governorship of Texas. Six years after that,
he was elected leader of the free world and began ''case
cracking'' on a dizzying array of subjects, proffering his
various solutions, in both foreign and domestic affairs. But
the pointed ''defend your position'' queries -- so central to
the H.B.S. method and rigorous analysis of all kinds -- were
infrequent. Questioning a regional supervisor or V.P. for
planning is one thing. Questioning the president of the United
States is another.
Still, some couldn't resist. As I reported in ''The Price of
Loyalty,'' at the Bush administration's first National Security
Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel
Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush
launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years
before, how he wouldn't ''go by past reputations when it comes
to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value,'' and how
the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict
because ''I don't see much we can do over there at this
point.'' Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would
reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration --
of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon,
Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast
in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's
concerns impatiently. ''Sometimes a show of force by one side
can really clarify things.''
Such challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as
the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were
trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months
passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually,
Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely
private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board
Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during
foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had
the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know
very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver
rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to
take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush
was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down,
were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for
how long and on what topic. The president would listen without
betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-
discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly
parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod
anyone with direct, informed questions.
Each administration, over the course of a term, is steadily
shaped by its president, by his character, personality and
priorities. It is a process that unfolds on many levels. There
are, of course, a chief executive's policies, which are
executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies. But a few
months along, officials, top to bottom, will also start to
adopt the boss's phraseology, his presumptions, his rhythms. If
a president fishes, people buy poles; if he expresses
displeasure, aides get busy finding evidence to support the
judgment. A staff channels the leader.
A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W.
Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for
contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a
retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with
doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was
saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you'll be
rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling
the boss. He didn't second-guess himself; why should they?
Considering the trials that were soon to arrive, it is easy to
overlook what a difficult time this must have been for George
W. Bush. For nearly three decades, he had sat in classrooms,
and then at mahogany tables in corporate suites, with little to
contribute. Then, as governor of Texas, he was graced with a
pliable enough bipartisan Legislature, and the Legislature is
where the real work in that state's governance gets done. The
Texas Legislature's tension of opposites offered the structure
of point and counterpoint, which Bush could navigate
effectively with his strong, improvisational skills.
But the mahogany tables were now in the Situation Room and in
the large conference room adjacent to the Oval Office. He
guided a ruling party. Every issue that entered that rarefied
sanctum required a complex decision, demanding focus,
thoroughness and analytical potency.
For the president, as Biden said, to be acutely aware of his
weaknesses -- and to have to worry about revealing uncertainty
or need or confusion, even to senior officials -- must have
presented an untenable bind. By summer's end that first year,
Vice President ***** Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he
attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their
weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside
the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only
the most trustworthy confidants. The circle around Bush is the
tightest around any president in the modern era, and ''it's
both exclusive and exclusionary,'' Christopher DeMuth,
president of the American Enterprise Institute, the
neoconservative policy group, told me. ''It's a too tightly
managed decision-making process. When they make decisions, a
very small number of people are in the room, and it has a
certain effect of constricting the range of alternatives being
offered.''
On Sept. 11, 2001, the country watched intently to see if and
how Bush would lead. After a couple of days in which he seemed
shaky and uncertain, he emerged, and the moment he began to
lead -- standing on the World Trade Center's rubble with a
bullhorn -- for much of America, any lingering doubts about his
abilities vanished. No one could afford doubt, not then. They
wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, having never felt
the reasonable hesitations that slowed more deliberative men,
and many presidents, including his father.
Within a few days of the attacks, Bush decided on the invasion
of Afghanistan and was barking orders. His speech to the joint
session of Congress on Sept. 20 will most likely be the
greatest of his presidency. He prayed for God's help. And many
Americans, of all faiths, prayed with him -- or for him. It was
simple and nondenominational: a prayer that he'd be up to this
moment, so that he -- and, by extension, we as a country --
would triumph in that dark hour.
This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape.
Faith, which for months had been coloring the decision-making
process and a host of political tactics -- think of his address
to the nation on stem-cell research -- now began to guide
events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush
turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a
wellspring of power and confidence.
Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn't vanish.
They never do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a
few years along, the first debt payments start coming due. Or
the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price affirms his
sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division
cripples the company. There's a startled look -- how'd that
happen? In this case, the challenge of mobilizing the various
agencies of the United States government and making certain
that agreed-upon goals become demonstrable outcomes grew
exponentially.
Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually
every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather
than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American
troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the
mountains of Tora Bora. Many have also been critical of the
president's handling of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19
hijackers; despite Bush's setting goals in the so-called
''financial war on terror,'' the Saudis failed to cooperate
with American officials in hunting for the financial sources of
terror. Still, the nation wanted bold action and was delighted
to get it. Bush's approval rating approached 90 percent.
Meanwhile, the executive's balance between analysis and
resolution, between contemplation and action, was being tipped
by the pull of righteous faith.
It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a
question about homeland security efforts infringing on civil
rights, that Bush first used the telltale word ''crusade'' in
public. ''This is a new kind of -- a new kind of evil,'' he
said. ''And we understand. And the American people are
beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is
going to take a while.''
Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari
Fleischer tried to perform damage control. ''I think what the
president was saying was -- had no intended consequences for
anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a
broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations
around the world to join.'' As to ''any connotations that would
upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the
president would regret if anything like that was conveyed.''
A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the
Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of
Jim Towey as head of the president's faith-based and community
initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job
feeling that the initiative was not about ''compassionate
conservatism,'' as originally promised, but rather a political
giveaway to the Christian right, a way to consolidate and
energize that part of the base.
Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over
and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and
squeezed. ''Jim, how ya doin', how ya doin'!'' he exclaimed.
Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage
therapist had given him Wallis's book, ''Faith Works.'' His joy
at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was
palpable -- a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a
time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor.
Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, '''but in the
State of the Union address a few days before, you said that
unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on
this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr.
President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our
time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will
lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on
terrorism.'''
Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of
Wallis and other members of the clergy.
''No, Mr. President,'' Wallis says he told Bush, ''We need your
leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to
support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which
the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the
threat of terrorism.''
Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They
never spoke again after that.
''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-
help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I
started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over
the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't
want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''
But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a
president have time to entertain doubters? In a speech in
Alaska two weeks later, Bush again referred to the war on
terror as a ''crusade.''
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in
Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former
communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a
senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's
displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I
didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the
very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the
reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who
''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he
continued. ''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 that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do.''
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based
community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington,
it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of
Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the
October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A
Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the
president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not
going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began
to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to
debate it with you.''
The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of
whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community
about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That
question will be investigated after the election, but if no
tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or
alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be
surprised. ''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this
is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I
don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get
faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to
resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said
when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue
an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''
In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National
Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few
thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on
the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was
enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As
he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in ''Plan of
Attack'': ''Going into this period, I was praying for strength
to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify
the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my
case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as
possible.''
Machiavelli's oft-cited line about the adequacy of the
perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of
confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence --
true confidence -- be willed? Or must it be earned?
George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence
men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many
critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few
other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch.
No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of
confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies
are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching
confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create
reality.
Whether you can run the world on faith, it's clear you can run
one hell of a campaign on it.
George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance
electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support
of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on
intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness --
rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness,
the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the
president and the just God who affirms him.
The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this
calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of
televised, carefully choreographed ''Ask President Bush''
events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with
prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the
feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the
Bush army. ''I've voted Republican from the very first time I
could vote,'' said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin,
Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college
gym. ''And I also want to say this is the very first time that
I have felt that God was in the White House.'' Bush simply said
''thank you'' as a wave of raucous applause rose from the
assembled.
Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using
strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the
White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private
meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was
reported to have said, ''I trust God speaks through me.'' In
this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman
denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but
noted that ''his faith helps him in his service to people.''
A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans
identify themselves as evangelical or ''born again.'' While
this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches
and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most
ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many
from a healthy subset of approximately four million
evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000 -- potential new arrivals
to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a
tight contest toward a rout.
This signaling system -- forceful, national, varied, yet clean
of the president's specific fingerprint -- carries enormous
weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from
Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over
concerns about the nature of Bush's certainty. ''This issue,''
he says, of Bush's ''announcing that 'I carry the word of God'
is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to
the base with that message, but in the swing states he does
not.''
Come to the hustings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004,
you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is
harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters
registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the
news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the
Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based
president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.
Righteous rage -- that's what Hardy Billington felt when he
heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in
Massachusetts. ''It made me upset and disgusted, things going
on in Massachusetts,'' the 52-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Mo.,
told me. ''I prayed, then I got to work.'' Billington spent
$830 in early July to put up a billboard on the edge of town.
It read: ''I Support President Bush and the Men and Women
Fighting for Our Country. We Invite President Bush to Visit
Poplar Bluff.'' Soon Billington and his friend David Hahn, a
fundamentalist preacher, started a petition drive. They
gathered 10,000 signatures. That fact eventually reached the
White House scheduling office.
By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more
than 20,000 assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to
the podium. ''The largest group I ever talked to I think was
seven people, and I'm not much of a talker,'' Billington, a shy
man with three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties
that he owns, told me several days later. ''I've never been so
frightened.''
But Billington said he ''looked to God'' and said what was in
his heart. ''The United States is the greatest country in the
world,'' he told the rally. ''President Bush is the greatest
president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my
country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ.''
The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the
president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were
Bush's periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of
the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it --
and ''it'' was the faith.
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in
late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to
Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the
president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an
idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of
you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few
blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue
you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by
folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people
who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The
L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he
walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They
have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops,
his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what
those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this
instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire
reality-based community.
The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support.
He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to
stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage
while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They
respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is
something that people, especially those who are religious, tend
to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone,
that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind
beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the
occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was
rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray
harder.
Bush's speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic
appeal: ''For all Americans, these years in our history will
always stand apart,'' he said. ''You know, there are quiet
times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its
leaders. This isn't one of those times. This is a time that
needs -- when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep
faith in the values that make us a great nation.''
The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge
-- his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the
nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve,
to whatever end, will turn the wheel of history.
Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the
spirit. In the end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by
God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it
goes without saying.
''To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses
the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and
protect this nation,'' Billington told me, voicing an idea
shared by millions of Bush supporters. ''Other people will not
protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this
president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.''
But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush's
hand, Billington remembered being reserved. '''I really thank
God that you're the president' was all I told him.'' Bush, he
recalled, said, ''Thank you.''
''He knew what I meant,'' Billington said. ''I believe he's an
instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say,
you know, in public.''
Is there anyone in America who feels that John Kerry is an
instrument of God?
"I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John
Kerry's throat,'' George W. Bush said last month at a
confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a
hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-
called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd -- at one
time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush
or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of
them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the
ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.
The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively
beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should
it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if
predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.
He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain
seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate.
According to notes provided to me, and according to several
guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard,
he said that ''Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the
Saudis . . .
then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have
the oil.'' He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint
a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and
perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.
''Won't that be amazing?'' said Peter Stent, a rancher and
conservationist who attended the luncheon. ''Can you imagine?
Four appointments!''
After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone
asked what he's going to do about energy policy with worldwide
oil reserves predicted to peak.
Bush said: ''I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in
Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are
interesting.'' He mentions energy from ''processing corn.''
''I'm going to bring all this up in the debate, and I'm going
to push it,'' he said, and then tried out a line. ''Do you
realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the
size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size
of the Columbia airport?''
The questions came from many directions -- respectful, but
clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd ''spend
whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq,'' that
''homeland security cost more than I originally thought.''
In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying
that ''hands down,'' he has the most diverse senior staff in
terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany. ''You know, I'm sitting
there with Schroder one day with Colin and Condi. And I'm
thinking: What's Schroder thinking?! He's sitting here with two
blacks and one's a woman.''
But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most
on his mind: his second term.
''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush
said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing
of Social Security.'' The victories he expects in November, he
said, will give us ''two years, at least, until the next
midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be
quacking like a duck.''
Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon
and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later:
''I've never seen the president so ebullient. He was so
confident. He feels so strongly he will win.'' Yet one part of
Bush's 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn -- a board
member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a
former ambassador to Switzerland -- a moment's pause. The
president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near
the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for
faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about
giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said
that questions about separation of church and state were not an
issue.
Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him
''a little uneasy.'' Many conservative evangelicals ''feel they
have a direct line from God,'' he said, and feel Bush is
divinely chosen.
''I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't
think, though, that he feels that he's been ordained by God to
serve the country.'' Gildenhorn paused, then said, ''But you
know, I really haven't discussed it with him.''
A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified
told me: ''I'm happy he's certain of victory and that he's
ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me
a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he's
planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we
might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets
complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging
in and thinking things through. What's that line? -- the
devil's in the details. If you don't go after that devil, he'll
come after you.''
Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his
admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable
doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this
high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In
politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated
until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems
clear of competitors.
Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance --
sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal
with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith?
What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation
the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which
the world now precariously turns?
That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk
about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He
is no longer invited to the White House.
''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're
penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and
accountability and help us reach for something higher than
ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us
beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when
it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a
dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's
no reflection.
''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said
after a moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to
deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as
humans so very much want.''
And what is that?
''Easy certainty.''
Ron Suskind was the senior national-affairs reporter for The
Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. He is the author most
recently of ''The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White
House and the Education of Paul O'Neill.''
October 17, 2004
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and
a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me
recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the
Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that
conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one
raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists
and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and
religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a
light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to
Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort
of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to
do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described
libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for
traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went
on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about
Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you
have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're
extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them,
because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with
inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly
believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that
overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is
to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.''
Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on
faith.''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March
just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe
Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was
in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,''
he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many
concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the
peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of
the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush,
Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the
United States was on the right course and that all was well.
'''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when
you know you don't know the facts?'''
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's
shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room
grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't
good enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to
make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an
extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity
and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top
deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine
Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq --
have been told for years when they requested explanations for
many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed
to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he
relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of
state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a
deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that
has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble
the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W.
Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic
''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that
their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first
presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John
Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's
certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can
be certain and be wrong.''
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the
temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and
religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith
asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and
abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal
journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has
also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The
president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers,
his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican
Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a
creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its
rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were
surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar
expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who
have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since
9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of
doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question
him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the
powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved
mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided
the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the
day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In
meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case.
And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose
faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these
remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election
effort in New Jersey.)
The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties
of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall
between organized religion and political authority. But
suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush --
both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily,
inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the
faith-based presidency.
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model
that has been enormously effective at, among other things,
keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a
kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the
late winter and spring, with revelations from the former
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from
the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted
O'Neill saying that Bush was like ''a blind man in a room full
of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to the White House.
But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans
calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's
faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon
for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some
were willing to talk because they said they thought George W.
Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if
he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence
fatigue -- public servants, some with vast experience, who feel
they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era
children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence
still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After
many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications
director, said in a letter that the president and those around
him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.
Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken
with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the
president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others
focused on Bush's substantial interpersonal gifts as a
compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities.
Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat,
are worried about something other than his native intelligence.
''He's plenty smart enough to do the job,'' Levin said. ''It's
his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles
me.'' But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe
at the president's preternatural certainty and wonderment about
its source.
There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I
am able to piece together and tell for the record.
In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a
few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans
and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the
United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and
Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion
that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing
peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone
agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France
and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the
Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born
Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust
survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian
countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to
describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an
ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force
of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly,
several people in the room recall.
''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said.
''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly
reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said
Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral,
without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside,
that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the
country in the event of invasion.
Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no
army.''
The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.
A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses
gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries
for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos
and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said,
with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''
This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval
Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal
Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who
meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos,
through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his
not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)
This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open
dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent
value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It
could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and,
just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more
vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the
terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one
of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said
any number of times on the campaign trail, ''By remaining
resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''
He didn't always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush,
just as he was ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim
Wallis, a man with the added advantage of having deep acuity
about the struggles between fact and faith. Wallis, an
evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners -- a
progressive organization of advocates for social justice -- was
asked during the transition to help pull together a diverse
group of members of the clergy to talk about faith and poverty
with the new president-elect.
In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church
in Austin, Tex., with 30 or so clergy members and asked, ''How
do I speak to the soul of the nation?'' He listened as each
guest articulated a vision of what might be. The afternoon
hours passed. No one wanted to leave. People rose from their
chairs and wandered the room, huddling in groups, conversing
passionately. In one cluster, Bush and Wallis talked of their
journeys.
''I've never lived around poor people,'' Wallis remembers Bush
saying. ''I don't know what they think. I really don't know
what they think. I'm a white Republican guy who doesn't get it.
How do I get it?''
Wallis recalls replying, ''You need to listen to the poor and
those who live and work with poor people.''
Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and said,
''I want you to hear this.'' A month later, an almost identical
line -- ''many in our country do not know the pain of poverty,
but we can listen to those who do'' -- ended up in the
inaugural address.
That was an earlier Bush, one rather more open and conversant,
matching his impulsiveness with a can-do attitude and seemingly
unafraid of engaging with a diverse group. The president has an
array of interpersonal gifts that fit well with this
fearlessness -- a headlong, unalloyed quality, best suited to
ranging among different types of people, searching for the
outlines of what will take shape as principles.
Yet this strong suit, an improvisational gift, has long been
forced to wrestle with its ''left brain'' opposite -- a
struggle, across 30 years, with the critical and analytical
skills so prized in America's professional class. In terms of
intellectual faculties, that has been the ongoing battle for
this talented man, first visible during the lackluster years at
Yale and five years of drift through his 20's -- a time when
peers were busy building credentials in law, business or
medicine.
Biden, who early on became disenchanted with Bush's grasp of
foreign-policy issues and is among John Kerry's closest Senate
friends, has spent a lot of time trying to size up the
president. ''Most successful people are good at identifying,
very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing
themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us average
Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on
our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they
might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to
do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or
friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has
served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He
never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''
Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that's just a
catch phrase -- he never ran anything of consequence in the
private sector. The M.B.A. president would be more accurate: he
did, after all, graduate from Harvard Business School. And some
who have worked under him in the White House and know about
business have spotted a strange business-school time warp. It's
as if a 1975 graduate from H.B.S. -- one who had little chance
to season theory with practice during the past few decades of
change in corporate America -- has simply been dropped into the
most challenging management job in the world.
One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems
of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the ''case
cracker'' problem. The case studies are static, generally a
snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various
''solutions'' students proffer, and then defend in class
against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives.
They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something
H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms,
learn in their first few years in business. They discover,
often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows
and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility,
rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant
reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful
second-guessing.
George W. Bush, who went off to Texas to be an oil wildcatter,
never had a chance to learn these lessons about the power of
nuanced, fact-based analysis. The small oil companies he ran
tended to lose money; much of their value was as tax shelters.
(The investors were often friends of his father's.) Later, with
the Texas Rangers baseball team, he would act as an able front
man but never really as a boss.
Instead of learning the limitations of his Harvard training,
what George W. Bush learned instead during these fitful years
were lessons about faith and its particular efficacy. It was in
1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush
says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that
point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his
career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those
close to Bush about a faith ''intervention'' of sorts at the
Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but
here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W.,
drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's.
George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along
the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then
the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who
came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in
probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon
born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and
wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was
saved.
His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but
faith was clearly having little impact on his broken career.
Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn't do much
for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years after receiving
salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from
one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come
from this period. It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing
director and cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the Washington-
based investment firm that is one of the town's most powerful
institutions and a longtime business home for the president's
father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken
private and established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle
investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former
Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.
Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension
managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek
approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be
on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job.
.. . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't
think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much
value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the
meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of
jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of
said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure
this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else.
Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the
board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said:
'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I
don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign
from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see
him again.''
Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair's board. Around
this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush's possible
candidacy for the governorship of Texas. Six years after that,
he was elected leader of the free world and began ''case
cracking'' on a dizzying array of subjects, proffering his
various solutions, in both foreign and domestic affairs. But
the pointed ''defend your position'' queries -- so central to
the H.B.S. method and rigorous analysis of all kinds -- were
infrequent. Questioning a regional supervisor or V.P. for
planning is one thing. Questioning the president of the United
States is another.
Still, some couldn't resist. As I reported in ''The Price of
Loyalty,'' at the Bush administration's first National Security
Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel
Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush
launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years
before, how he wouldn't ''go by past reputations when it comes
to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value,'' and how
the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict
because ''I don't see much we can do over there at this
point.'' Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would
reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration --
of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon,
Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast
in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's
concerns impatiently. ''Sometimes a show of force by one side
can really clarify things.''
Such challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as
the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were
trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months
passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually,
Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely
private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board
Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during
foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had
the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know
very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver
rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to
take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush
was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down,
were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for
how long and on what topic. The president would listen without
betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-
discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly
parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod
anyone with direct, informed questions.
Each administration, over the course of a term, is steadily
shaped by its president, by his character, personality and
priorities. It is a process that unfolds on many levels. There
are, of course, a chief executive's policies, which are
executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies. But a few
months along, officials, top to bottom, will also start to
adopt the boss's phraseology, his presumptions, his rhythms. If
a president fishes, people buy poles; if he expresses
displeasure, aides get busy finding evidence to support the
judgment. A staff channels the leader.
A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W.
Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for
contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a
retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with
doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was
saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you'll be
rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling
the boss. He didn't second-guess himself; why should they?
Considering the trials that were soon to arrive, it is easy to
overlook what a difficult time this must have been for George
W. Bush. For nearly three decades, he had sat in classrooms,
and then at mahogany tables in corporate suites, with little to
contribute. Then, as governor of Texas, he was graced with a
pliable enough bipartisan Legislature, and the Legislature is
where the real work in that state's governance gets done. The
Texas Legislature's tension of opposites offered the structure
of point and counterpoint, which Bush could navigate
effectively with his strong, improvisational skills.
But the mahogany tables were now in the Situation Room and in
the large conference room adjacent to the Oval Office. He
guided a ruling party. Every issue that entered that rarefied
sanctum required a complex decision, demanding focus,
thoroughness and analytical potency.
For the president, as Biden said, to be acutely aware of his
weaknesses -- and to have to worry about revealing uncertainty
or need or confusion, even to senior officials -- must have
presented an untenable bind. By summer's end that first year,
Vice President ***** Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he
attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their
weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside
the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only
the most trustworthy confidants. The circle around Bush is the
tightest around any president in the modern era, and ''it's
both exclusive and exclusionary,'' Christopher DeMuth,
president of the American Enterprise Institute, the
neoconservative policy group, told me. ''It's a too tightly
managed decision-making process. When they make decisions, a
very small number of people are in the room, and it has a
certain effect of constricting the range of alternatives being
offered.''
On Sept. 11, 2001, the country watched intently to see if and
how Bush would lead. After a couple of days in which he seemed
shaky and uncertain, he emerged, and the moment he began to
lead -- standing on the World Trade Center's rubble with a
bullhorn -- for much of America, any lingering doubts about his
abilities vanished. No one could afford doubt, not then. They
wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, having never felt
the reasonable hesitations that slowed more deliberative men,
and many presidents, including his father.
Within a few days of the attacks, Bush decided on the invasion
of Afghanistan and was barking orders. His speech to the joint
session of Congress on Sept. 20 will most likely be the
greatest of his presidency. He prayed for God's help. And many
Americans, of all faiths, prayed with him -- or for him. It was
simple and nondenominational: a prayer that he'd be up to this
moment, so that he -- and, by extension, we as a country --
would triumph in that dark hour.
This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape.
Faith, which for months had been coloring the decision-making
process and a host of political tactics -- think of his address
to the nation on stem-cell research -- now began to guide
events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush
turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a
wellspring of power and confidence.
Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn't vanish.
They never do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a
few years along, the first debt payments start coming due. Or
the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price affirms his
sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division
cripples the company. There's a startled look -- how'd that
happen? In this case, the challenge of mobilizing the various
agencies of the United States government and making certain
that agreed-upon goals become demonstrable outcomes grew
exponentially.
Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually
every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather
than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American
troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the
mountains of Tora Bora. Many have also been critical of the
president's handling of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19
hijackers; despite Bush's setting goals in the so-called
''financial war on terror,'' the Saudis failed to cooperate
with American officials in hunting for the financial sources of
terror. Still, the nation wanted bold action and was delighted
to get it. Bush's approval rating approached 90 percent.
Meanwhile, the executive's balance between analysis and
resolution, between contemplation and action, was being tipped
by the pull of righteous faith.
It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a
question about homeland security efforts infringing on civil
rights, that Bush first used the telltale word ''crusade'' in
public. ''This is a new kind of -- a new kind of evil,'' he
said. ''And we understand. And the American people are
beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is
going to take a while.''
Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari
Fleischer tried to perform damage control. ''I think what the
president was saying was -- had no intended consequences for
anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a
broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations
around the world to join.'' As to ''any connotations that would
upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the
president would regret if anything like that was conveyed.''
A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the
Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of
Jim Towey as head of the president's faith-based and community
initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job
feeling that the initiative was not about ''compassionate
conservatism,'' as originally promised, but rather a political
giveaway to the Christian right, a way to consolidate and
energize that part of the base.
Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over
and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and
squeezed. ''Jim, how ya doin', how ya doin'!'' he exclaimed.
Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage
therapist had given him Wallis's book, ''Faith Works.'' His joy
at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was
palpable -- a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a
time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor.
Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, '''but in the
State of the Union address a few days before, you said that
unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on
this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr.
President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our
time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will
lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on
terrorism.'''
Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of
Wallis and other members of the clergy.
''No, Mr. President,'' Wallis says he told Bush, ''We need your
leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to
support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which
the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the
threat of terrorism.''
Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They
never spoke again after that.
''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-
help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I
started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over
the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't
want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''
But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a
president have time to entertain doubters? In a speech in
Alaska two weeks later, Bush again referred to the war on
terror as a ''crusade.''
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in
Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former
communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a
senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's
displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I
didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the
very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the
reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who
''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he
continued. ''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 that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do.''
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based
community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington,
it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of
Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the
October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A
Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the
president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not
going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began
to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to
debate it with you.''
The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of
whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community
about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That
question will be investigated after the election, but if no
tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or
alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be
surprised. ''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this
is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I
don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get
faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to
resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said
when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue
an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''
In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National
Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few
thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on
the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was
enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As
he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in ''Plan of
Attack'': ''Going into this period, I was praying for strength
to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify
the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my
case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as
possible.''
Machiavelli's oft-cited line about the adequacy of the
perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of
confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence --
true confidence -- be willed? Or must it be earned?
George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence
men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many
critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few
other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch.
No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of
confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies
are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching
confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create
reality.
Whether you can run the world on faith, it's clear you can run
one hell of a campaign on it.
George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance
electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support
of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on
intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness --
rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness,
the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the
president and the just God who affirms him.
The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this
calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of
televised, carefully choreographed ''Ask President Bush''
events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with
prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the
feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the
Bush army. ''I've voted Republican from the very first time I
could vote,'' said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin,
Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college
gym. ''And I also want to say this is the very first time that
I have felt that God was in the White House.'' Bush simply said
''thank you'' as a wave of raucous applause rose from the
assembled.
Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using
strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the
White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private
meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was
reported to have said, ''I trust God speaks through me.'' In
this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman
denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but
noted that ''his faith helps him in his service to people.''
A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans
identify themselves as evangelical or ''born again.'' While
this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches
and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most
ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many
from a healthy subset of approximately four million
evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000 -- potential new arrivals
to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a
tight contest toward a rout.
This signaling system -- forceful, national, varied, yet clean
of the president's specific fingerprint -- carries enormous
weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from
Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over
concerns about the nature of Bush's certainty. ''This issue,''
he says, of Bush's ''announcing that 'I carry the word of God'
is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to
the base with that message, but in the swing states he does
not.''
Come to the hustings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004,
you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is
harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters
registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the
news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the
Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based
president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.
Righteous rage -- that's what Hardy Billington felt when he
heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in
Massachusetts. ''It made me upset and disgusted, things going
on in Massachusetts,'' the 52-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Mo.,
told me. ''I prayed, then I got to work.'' Billington spent
$830 in early July to put up a billboard on the edge of town.
It read: ''I Support President Bush and the Men and Women
Fighting for Our Country. We Invite President Bush to Visit
Poplar Bluff.'' Soon Billington and his friend David Hahn, a
fundamentalist preacher, started a petition drive. They
gathered 10,000 signatures. That fact eventually reached the
White House scheduling office.
By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more
than 20,000 assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to
the podium. ''The largest group I ever talked to I think was
seven people, and I'm not much of a talker,'' Billington, a shy
man with three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties
that he owns, told me several days later. ''I've never been so
frightened.''
But Billington said he ''looked to God'' and said what was in
his heart. ''The United States is the greatest country in the
world,'' he told the rally. ''President Bush is the greatest
president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my
country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ.''
The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the
president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were
Bush's periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of
the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it --
and ''it'' was the faith.
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in
late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to
Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the
president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an
idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of
you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few
blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue
you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by
folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people
who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The
L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he
walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They
have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops,
his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what
those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this
instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire
reality-based community.
The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support.
He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to
stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage
while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They
respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is
something that people, especially those who are religious, tend
to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone,
that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind
beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the
occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was
rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray
harder.
Bush's speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic
appeal: ''For all Americans, these years in our history will
always stand apart,'' he said. ''You know, there are quiet
times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its
leaders. This isn't one of those times. This is a time that
needs -- when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep
faith in the values that make us a great nation.''
The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge
-- his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the
nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve,
to whatever end, will turn the wheel of history.
Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the
spirit. In the end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by
God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it
goes without saying.
''To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses
the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and
protect this nation,'' Billington told me, voicing an idea
shared by millions of Bush supporters. ''Other people will not
protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this
president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.''
But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush's
hand, Billington remembered being reserved. '''I really thank
God that you're the president' was all I told him.'' Bush, he
recalled, said, ''Thank you.''
''He knew what I meant,'' Billington said. ''I believe he's an
instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say,
you know, in public.''
Is there anyone in America who feels that John Kerry is an
instrument of God?
"I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John
Kerry's throat,'' George W. Bush said last month at a
confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a
hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-
called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd -- at one
time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush
or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of
them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the
ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.
The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively
beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should
it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if
predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.
He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain
seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate.
According to notes provided to me, and according to several
guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard,
he said that ''Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the
Saudis . . .
then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have
the oil.'' He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint
a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and
perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.
''Won't that be amazing?'' said Peter Stent, a rancher and
conservationist who attended the luncheon. ''Can you imagine?
Four appointments!''
After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone
asked what he's going to do about energy policy with worldwide
oil reserves predicted to peak.
Bush said: ''I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in
Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are
interesting.'' He mentions energy from ''processing corn.''
''I'm going to bring all this up in the debate, and I'm going
to push it,'' he said, and then tried out a line. ''Do you
realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the
size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size
of the Columbia airport?''
The questions came from many directions -- respectful, but
clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd ''spend
whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq,'' that
''homeland security cost more than I originally thought.''
In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying
that ''hands down,'' he has the most diverse senior staff in
terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany. ''You know, I'm sitting
there with Schroder one day with Colin and Condi. And I'm
thinking: What's Schroder thinking?! He's sitting here with two
blacks and one's a woman.''
But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most
on his mind: his second term.
''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush
said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing
of Social Security.'' The victories he expects in November, he
said, will give us ''two years, at least, until the next
midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be
quacking like a duck.''
Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon
and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later:
''I've never seen the president so ebullient. He was so
confident. He feels so strongly he will win.'' Yet one part of
Bush's 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn -- a board
member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a
former ambassador to Switzerland -- a moment's pause. The
president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near
the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for
faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about
giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said
that questions about separation of church and state were not an
issue.
Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him
''a little uneasy.'' Many conservative evangelicals ''feel they
have a direct line from God,'' he said, and feel Bush is
divinely chosen.
''I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't
think, though, that he feels that he's been ordained by God to
serve the country.'' Gildenhorn paused, then said, ''But you
know, I really haven't discussed it with him.''
A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified
told me: ''I'm happy he's certain of victory and that he's
ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me
a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he's
planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we
might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets
complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging
in and thinking things through. What's that line? -- the
devil's in the details. If you don't go after that devil, he'll
come after you.''
Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his
admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable
doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this
high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In
politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated
until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems
clear of competitors.
Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance --
sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal
with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith?
What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation
the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which
the world now precariously turns?
That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk
about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He
is no longer invited to the White House.
''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're
penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and
accountability and help us reach for something higher than
ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us
beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when
it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a
dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's
no reflection.
''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said
after a moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to
deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as
humans so very much want.''
And what is that?
''Easy certainty.''
Ron Suskind was the senior national-affairs reporter for The
Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. He is the author most
recently of ''The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White
House and the Education of Paul O'Neill.''
--
Yours truly,
The Lone Weasel
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| User: "basilod" |
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| Title: Re: Dumb Hunches & Religious Feelings Better Than Hard Facts - In Iraq: 1092 US Troops Dead, 7532 Wounded |
17 Oct 2004 02:46:13 PM |
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"The Lone Weasel" <loneweaselNO@SPAMyahoo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9585819BFA265loneweaselyahooco@130.133.1.4...
October 17, 2004
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
I am sorry that I had to cut the finest piece of writing I have seen in a
long, long time - it was taking up too much bandwidth.
I have mixed feelings after reading it. On one hand, it confirms a lot of
things we have been guessing about GWB. On the other hand, it brings a
feeling that the new Dark Middle Ages are about to dawn upon America. Given
the prominent space occupied by America in the world, those American Dark
Middle Ages are going to affect much of the world for the worse. I am
afraid that they will bring their new version of the Holy Inquisition. The
Crusades have already started. Fasten your seat bealts fellow Americans.
You are in for a ride to the dark side. After all, we, the reality-based
community are outnumbered by the blind believers. When you try to impose
democracy in a society in which blind believers are the majority, you are
getting faith-based presidency in the US just like you are getting Shi'a
rule in Iraq. In both cases the darkness is coming back.
.
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| User: "basilod" |
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| Title: Re: Dumb Hunches & Religious Feelings Better Than Hard Facts - In Iraq: 1092 US Troops Dead, 7532 Wounded |
17 Oct 2004 03:11:15 PM |
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"basilod" <basilod@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:9_zcd.9175$SZ5.8286@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
"The Lone Weasel" <loneweaselNO@SPAMyahoo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9585819BFA265loneweaselyahooco@130.133.1.4...
October 17, 2004
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
I am sorry that I had to cut the finest piece of writing I have seen in a
long, long time - it was taking up too much bandwidth.
I have mixed feelings after reading it. On one hand, it confirms a lot of
things we have been guessing about GWB. On the other hand, it brings a
feeling that the new Dark Middle Ages are about to dawn upon America.
Given the prominent space occupied by America in the world, those American
Dark Middle Ages are going to affect much of the world for the worse. I
am afraid that they will bring their new version of the Holy Inquisition.
The Crusades have already started. Fasten your seat bealts fellow
Americans. You are in for a ride to the dark side. After all, we, the
reality-based community are outnumbered by the blind believers. When you
try to impose democracy in a society in which blind believers are the
majority, you are getting faith-based presidency in the US just like you
are getting Shi'a rule in Iraq. In both cases the darkness is coming
back.
"Eppur si muove" ("And yet it does move")
Mumbling these words quietly to himself, or so the story goes, Galileo
Galilei (1564-1642) left the session of the Inquisition that had found him
guilty after a trial for "grave suspicion of heresy". The "heresy" was in
connection with his publication of a book, "Dialogue on the Tides" in which
his belief in the Copernican notion of a Sun centered universe had sort of
"slipped in".
In Italy in 1633, suggesting that the earth, that rock solid center of God's
universe actually moved around another body, the Sun, was not the wisest
thing to do. In fact that idea could get you killed... or worse. Galileo got
off easy since he was sentenced to life in prison which lucky for him,
became permanent house arrest instead.
Oh and in addition he was commanded to never mention the idea again, his
book was burned and the sentence against him was to be read publicly in
every university. "And yet it does move". He may not actually have said it,
in fact it would have been extremely dangerous for him to do that, but he no
doubt thought it.
Here is my version of Galileo's heresy - it will take the believers several
more centuries to comprehend the phrase below, the phase which I accepted as
my personal motto some 30 years ago:
"Man is the negative entropy of the Universe"
(Buckminster Fuller/Norbert Wiener, 1957)
The phrase above refers to the long run. In the short run, however, it
looks like positive entropy (measure of disorder) is taking over.
.
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| User: "Docky Wocky" |
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| Title: Re: Dumb Hunches & Religious Feelings Better Than Hard Facts - In Iraq: 1092 US Troops Dead, 7532 Wounded |
17 Oct 2004 03:19:06 PM |
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So we are to believe when confronted by an raging army of religious zealots
and kooks, that the man to lead the forces of enlightenment would best be a
half-assed flip-flopping lawyer appeaser who, besides changing sides as
result of his own military experience, cannot even level with his
constituents whether he is Irish or Jewish?
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| User: "The Lone Weasel" |
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| Title: Re: Dumb Hunches & Religious Feelings Better Than Hard Facts - In Iraq: 1092 US Troops Dead, 7532 Wounded |
17 Oct 2004 05:09:23 PM |
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"Docky Wocky" <mrchuck@lst.net> wrote in
news:_sAcd.1128$EP4.1126@trnddc06:
So we are to believe when confronted by an raging army of
religious zealots and kooks, that the man to lead the
forces of enlightenment
You mean like the "Swedish Army", Wacky Ducky?
would best be a half-assed
flip-flopping...
....religious kook, a guy who got special favors getting in
the Texas AN | | | |
