WaxWorks
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Thursday, March 18, 2004
The Great Divider
I was critical of Richard Cohen's columns during the 2000 campaign, because too often he just followed the herd when he wrote about Gore, but he has been on fire on the 2004 campaign.
Readers will remember that I posted his column where he argued that if Bush wants to get credit for dealing with September 11, he needs to also remember that September 10 is his too.
Now he's got another great column discussing the complete lie Bush sold the country in 2000 about being "a uniter, not a divider:"
Sooner or later some industrious journalist will comb through all the promises George W. Bush made during his first presidential campaign and see which ones he kept. A good start would be to return to the speech he gave in Iowa at the beginning of the 2000 campaign. He promised to reduce taxes, to "rebuild the military," to institute a missile defense system and to impose education standards -- all of which he has done. Still, he gets a failing grade.
For it was at Ames, Iowa, on Aug. 14, 1999, that Bush declared himself "a uniter, not a divider" -- maybe his most important promise and the one he has clearly not kept. He prefaced that vow by saying, "I reject the ugly politics of division." Instead he has reveled in it, pursuing policies and appointments that sometimes seem designed to do nothing more than energize the president's conservative base and drive everyone else up the wall
Cohen also discusses what is that makes Bush such a divider:
[T]o a degree that is impossible to quantify, it also has to do with Bush's demeanor, a
perceived smugness and a plain unwillingness to be what he promised he would be: a uniter.
On the contrary, he came out of the gate as a hard-edged conservative. In foreign affairs, he repudiated treaties and agreements. He became unilateralism personified. In domestic affairs, he acted for all the world as if he had won a landslide election and not a squeaker that had to be decided by the Supreme Court. If it wasn't for the "activist judges" he so dislikes, he would now be just another gentleman rancher in Texas.
"I know how to lead," Bush said that day in Iowa -- but he does not. Leadership does not mean going your own way. It means getting others to follow, constructing a consensus. Bush has failed to do this, and the failure is not due to a lack of leadership skills. It's purposeful. The narrowness of the election kept Bush close to his conservative base. Among other things, he has nominated judges who are not mere conservatives but true right-wing reactionaries. In two cases his nominees had to be sneaked onto the bench by fiat, not by Senate confirmation. Just recently Bush threw his base the red meat of a frivolous constitutional amendment that would bar gay marriage. It's a sop to homophobes and Bush knows it. His body language gives him away.
In the words of the man he ... defeated (no, more like "was the declared the winner against), when that man was referring to his father: It's time for them to go.
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