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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 Dick 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
CEO, 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."
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