The State of the Presidency
EMERY, NOEMIE
The State of the Presidency Bush has become a bigger man in a bigger office. BY NOEMIE EMERY Anew George W. Bush last Tuesday addressed a transformed country, wholly unlike the one he campaigned...
...Bush—and the country—had been tested too little and given too much, and seemed like children when measured alongside their parents, not least in the recent campaign...
...Instead, the world has turned upside down...
...the man who once could not name the leader of Pakistan is wholly conversant with West Asian issues...
...But the momentum was seized by the social polarizers, who grabbed hold of each party's base...
...This change in the country tracks the great change in Bush, who through part of last year seemed unfocused and drifting...
...By early December, 70 percent were satisfied, and only 28 percent dissatisfied...
...Identity politics...
...given the office on December 12, when the Supreme Court of the United States put an end to the attempts of the Supreme Court of Florida to give the great prize to his rival, Bush became commander in chief on September 11, 2001, and a landslide president three days later, when he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington in the morning, and at ground zero in New York that afternoon...
...Ordinary people, who never had thought themselves heroes, brought down Flight 93...
...The compassionate president is now the war leader...
...Bush's father was a war hero at 18, a fighter pilot shot down in the Pacific Ocean...
...BY NOEMIE EMERY Anew George W. Bush last Tuesday addressed a transformed country, wholly unlike the one he campaigned in, and as not quite the man who campaigned...
...It is probably true that he, like the country, was tough underneath all along, but until now lacked the venue to show it...
...7 to Sept...
...Impeachment, that odd case of ' blowback, when the harassment traps laid by feminists to trip up their enemies tripped up Bill Clinton instead...
...On September 11, it came rushing back...
...If it is intoxicating to be shot at and missed, it is also intoxicating to be tested, and to do more than one ever imagined...
...Anthrax loomed, alerts continued, and it felt better still...
...Showing the multiple sides of his nature, he is running a war that is also compassionate...
...He too never regained his early luster...
...Gone is the political dynamic of the past dozen years, gone the small presidency, gone the politics of minor entitlements, gone the burden of the social issues, gone the politics of splitting the difference between the fringe and the middle, of trying to graft a slice of the wary and unengaged center to an angry and overengaged base...
...The culture held, and the market recovered...
...Groups once fiercely opposed now appear willing to give him a hearing...
...In 2000, Bush planned to run as a different kind of Republican and thrilling outsider, able to attract many new people by running against his party's extremes...
...Culture warriors took a triple hit on September 11: They lost visibility and access to media...
...Young Al had been raised as a prince...
...In the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland says he has settled "la question Bush," or the matter of gravitas...
...Ordinary people behaved with astonishing valor...
...September 11 gave Bush a second chance...
...David Broder compares him to Lincoln and Kennedy...
...Bush has a saner political climate than before the strikes happened, a chance to build broad coalitions...
...the tormentor of language is frequently eloquent...
...In a way, Bush is starting to replicate his accomplishment in Texas, where he occupied the broad middle and coopted his opponents...
...Supreme Court, and the issues that emerged, and that poisoned that process, would dominate the decade ahead...
...In a Sept...
...The towers burned and collapsed, the Pentagon smoldered, the stock market tanked, and the public felt better...
...Nobody fled...
...There are no issues more basic than life and survival...
...Gays, in and out of the military...
...The office has changed...
...The country has changed...
...Gone is the Clintonian model of small, poll-driven issues...
...Bush conceded as much in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, when he assigned great wars and large deeds to his father's cohort, and small acts of kindness to his own...
...Not one of more than fifteen prominent Gore loyalists interviewed said their candidate would have done a better job," reports Richard Berke in the New York Times...
...Nobody crumbled...
...In the reign of George II, all of this was supposed to be true, only more so, trapped as he was by minority status, and two parties at absolute parity...
...Each base gave its party a firm floor of support and kept it competitive...
...10 Gallup poll, 55 percent of the respondents said they were 'dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States,' while only 43 percent were satisfied...
...Six days later came his big speech to Congress...
...Turns out he was serious...
...But we can say that he now has his shot...
...Bush's ratings are astral, even with Democrats...
...Bush survived, but as the candidate from Bob Jones University, not the best footing from which to court centrists...
...The country Bush ran in was both fat and ill-tempered, pessimistic, uncertain concerning its prospects and future...
...The chasm that previously existed between the political extremes was not so much resolved as swamped, in a great tide of fellow feeling...
...It came to an end at 8:46 in the morning of September 11, when people's minds were wrenched away from exotic diversions and focused on more basic things, such as matters of life and survival...
...Once ill at ease in blue parts of the country, he now loves New York, and vice versa...
...their leaders said things that were stupid and petty...
...There were three successive presidential elections in which the winner failed to reach 50 percent in the popular vote, and three elections roiled by voter rebellions: In 1992 and '96, the Reform party of H. Ross Perot carefully steered clear of all social issues, and in 2000 the cross-party favorite John McCain tried hard to do the same...
...I hear it the sad way—at wakes...
...The presidency of school uniforms and wars on tobacco has been replaced by the presidency of Special Forces uniforms and shooting wars...
...The old order was one of caretaker presidents, leading fragile majorities based on minuscule issues with limits imposed by interest-group power, and agendas driven from the fringes...
...Sexual harassment...
...To all of his country...
...Then Mario Cuomo withdrew from the race, and he was forced to run as the establishment, against candidates even stranger than he was...
...As the public dozed off, their voices became ever louder...
...Al Gore's parents had fought their way up from the most dire poverty...
...Rudy Giuliani emerged as the Winston S. Churchill of lower Manhattan...
...Politically speaking, the 1990s began on September 10, 1991, with the opening of the hearings on the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the U.S...
...George H.W...
...He repaired to his party's unions and interest groups, and never left them...
...Realignment is surely not certain, but it is now possible...
...No one since then has suggested he does Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But it also turned off and discouraged many swing voters, and put a ceiling on the growth of the parties...
...Americans everywhere became mad, and not frightened...
...Predictions of rot, from the left and the right, were proven mistaken...
...It is too early to tell what all these may lead to...
...Given a new set of large, basic issues around which to forge deep emotional bonds with the public, Bush has his big chance to do what he wanted, and define and expand his own party...
...The attacks gave Bush the greatest of political gifts: the chance to start over...
...Activists representing minority views on non-voting issues were the only party loyalists left...
...Establishing himself as the national leader, he started to bond with those people put off by Bob Jonesness: urbanites, union members, soccer and basketball moms...
...It is an opportunity he has eagerly seized...
...Even though the country was in worse shape after September 11 than before, people said they felt better," wrote the columnist Robert Samuelson...
...Bush has changed...
...Then catastrophe struck, and it perked up remarkably...
...Bush can "put together the old Reagan coalition," said Peter King, the congressman from Long Island...
...It shows...
...The public thought little of most of these issues, and when it did, it tended to cling to the middle...
...Years ago, so it seems, he called his campaign book A Charge to Keep, a phrase at the time that seemed windy and meaningless...
...The defiant Texan now seems at home everywhere...
...not fill the screen...
...Abortion...
...Then, on September 11, the softest generation got the greatest sucker punch of all time...
...For these reasons and others Michael Barone suggests that the "veto groups" of American politics have lost much of their power and salience...
...Proclaimed president by the networks shortly after two in the morning of November 8, 2000...
...Bush did not put a foot wrong...
...nothing bigger than this round-the-world war...
...Bush flew on weekends, in the National Guard...
...big issues are now driven from the center, and broad coalitions are within his reach...
...Bush, says Peggy Noonan in her new book about Reagan, is set to have an old-fashioned, Trumanesque presidency...
...His strong stance against terrorism gives him a platform from which to reach out to Jews...
...Nobody panicked...
...Then he was outflanked by John McCain, a temperamental outsider, and became the man running against the reformer, the handpicked candidate anointed by his party's establishment...
...The central political problem for presidential candidates of the last decade— how to convince your base that you are with them completely, while trying to reassure the rest of the country that you are not—proved too much for even the cleverest politicians, who swung back and forth between Sister Souljah moments and groveling, never quite managing the realignment that would boost one party above the other, and give it majority status...
...Bush, who squeaked into office by the most narrow of margins, is now strongly supported by almost 60 percent of the country, and has had the highest levels of sustained popularity for an American president since polling began...
...The presidency is back at the center of everything...
...There is one great thing common to all of these changes that is itself critical: the movement from the small and special in the direction of the basic and big...
...He has promised New York money and sympathy, bonded with the workers who were the day's heroes, pitched a perfect strike at Yankee Stadium...
...It breeds exhilaration, and further self-confidence...
...Many blacks seem to have dropped their reflexive hostility...
...Afghan women were freed, not by National Organization for Women press releases, but by George W. Bush and his armed forces...
...He has dropped bombs and foodstuffs, asked American children to raise money to help their Afghan counterparts, showed up at a soup kitchen to urge people to support charities overlooked in the rush to help the terrorists' victims...
...Arguments will rage over how much Bush has changed...
...He leads a country in which the political terrain has been utterly altered, with old constraints leveled, and new possibilities revealed...
...Bush is said to have told Michael Beschloss that he could feel the air leave his office once the Cold War had ended...
...Until the attacks...
...And that is not all that has changed...
...and their favorite tactic of divisive name-calling lost its rhetorical purchase...
...His moment may pass, and these thing may not happen...
...He really has connected to construction workers and cops and firemen...
...Bush has even been cheered in Manhattan...
...The implication, the unspoken dread, was that small, kindly acts might be all we were still good for...
...His rage at what was done on his watch to his country is open and raw...
...This strange, steamy reign of the race-gender issues lasted ten years and one day...
...At 55, as he puts it, he has found his "mission and moment...
...Nomination fights swung on definitions of purity, on issues of abortion and race...
...Gone is a politics driven by a cluster of race-gender themes...
...But not to describe what they are...
...Few seemed to notice or care much that Giuliani and Bush, Ridge and Rumsfeld, Powell and Cheney, had conflicting views on abortion...
...He is gaining hugely with independents, women, and moderates, the polls tell us...
...In 1992, Bill Clinton planned to run as a New Democrat and thrilling outsider, able to attract many new people by running against his party's establishment...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 21
