COMPARE AND CONTRAST….Two excerpts from articles about George Bush today. First, from Ron Brownstein’s review of three books about Bush:
What none of these books adequately explain is why Bush has been so confrontational and ideological in shaping his domestic agenda. As governor of Texas, he was a consensus-builder who routinely reached out to Democrats: He made substantive compromises on all of his major priorities in the state
His pattern as president has been very different. He has consistently aimed his proposals (from tax cuts to energy) at the interests of the Republican base, and he has usually resisted compromise unless absolutely necessary. With a restored Republican majority in Congress, Bush is now advancing an agenda that envisions another round of massive tax cuts, large increases in defense spending and sustained federal deficits that choke off domestic spending.
Next, this excerpt from Richard Reeves’ column:
[Washington] is a scary place. Not many people here believe Bush when he says he sees war as a last resort. From here, Bush the impatient, Bush the hater, seems ready to go to war no matter what happens — as if sending tens of thousands of soldiers far from home out there in the desert is reason enough to attack.
….There are words he likes; “commander” is one. Even his weird talk, the jumbled stuff, is sometimes revealing. Exactly a month before taking office, after the chaos of vote-counting in Florida, the new president-elect talked of the job this way: “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier. Just as long as I’m the dictator.”
That is from one scary Texan. There is some kind of anger in the man alone, hostility that sometimes seems barely under control — as if he were, in street language, being “disrespected.”
In the same way that conservatives had some kind of visceral loathing for Bill Clinton, I think this is the side of the Bush that sets liberal teeth on edge. It’s not so much that he’s dumb, it’s that he seems so petty, smallminded, and downright mean, someone who treats politics like a take-no-hostages siege where the goal is not the solution of problems but the utter humiliation of your opponents. I can understand someone liking his policies, but I find it hard to understand someone liking the man.
