A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (12 page)

The President mentioned that he is struck by the number of people he meets who tell him they are praying for him. He jokingly noted, “Now maybe the only people who pray in America come to my events,” but he wonders if there is evidence of a Third Awakening saying,
“It feels like it to me”
[emphasis added].

The First Great Awakening was a wave of Christian fervor that raged in colonial America from about 1730 to 1760; the Second Great Awakening generally refers to a similar religious revival that swept the nation from 1800 to 1830. For the president to predict not merely the imminence of a Third Great Awakening but to proclaim that it is already under way is to posit that religious passion is the predominant attribute of contemporary American life, shaping the thought processes and priorities of most Americans.

In the same September 2006 meeting, Bush claimed that the most intense support for Abraham Lincoln’s bid to end slavery came from Christians who were the by-product of the Second Awakening and who therefore “saw life in terms of good and evil.” According to Lowry:

He talked about the two constituencies that faithfully supported President Lincoln, noting that he had recently read extensively about the former President and his own policies aren’t based on his insights (nor obviously does he consider himself another Lincoln). Bush explained that Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people from the Second Awakening “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who agreed with Lincoln that slavery was evil, and the Union soldiers who Lincoln had “great affection and admiration for.”

Following on those observations, Bush elaborated on his Third Awakening supporters and their similar view—as well as his own—that life should be viewed “in terms of good and evil”:

A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me…. There was a stark change between the culture of the ’50’s and the ’60’s—boom—and I think there’s change happening here. It seems to me that there’s a Third Awakening.

The president’s proclamation of a new religious awakening in America came at a time when his popularity was at a low point and the war in Iraq was increasingly seen to be a debacle. Opposition to the president was so intense before the looming midterm election that Democrats had settled on a strategy of transforming that vote into a specific referendum on the highly unpopular president.

That the president would take solace in the extraordinary belief that he was presiding over a Third Great Awakening at the very moment he was most under siege is not surprising. He could comfort himself with the assurance that there was such strident opposition to him
not
because he had done anything wrong or because he had erred, but precisely because he
had not erred
, because he had unyieldingly devoted himself to Good, and was hated for that reason. In an October 2006 Fox interview with Bill O’Reilly, Bush seemed to make exactly that point. He agreed with O’Reilly that many opponents “hate” him because he is “a man of faith”:

O’REILLY: The secular progressives don’t like you because you’re a man of faith.

BUSH: Yes.

O’REILLY: You know that.

BUSH: Yes. That causes me to be sad for people who don’t like somebody because he happens to believe in the Almighty.

O’REILLY: Absolutely. They think you are some kind of evangelical. God tells you what to do and you go out and do it. And they hate that.

BUSH: I guess that I have pity for people who believe that. They don’t understand the relationship between man and the Almighty, then.

On several other occasions, the president has similarly suggested that his unpopularity was
not
a sign that he had gone astray and should change, but rather, that he was on a righteous course, and resistance to his policies and presidency were a by-product of his unyielding commitment to battling Evil. He began casting the dissatisfaction with his presidency as a challenge he must overcome—by steadfastly remaining on the moral course.

Further, and subsequent to the massive Democratic gains in the 2006 midterm election, the president increasingly began invoking the legacy of Harry Truman and claiming that, like Truman, his unpopularity would ultimately lead to his historical vindication. In December 2006, McClatchy’s Washington bureau reported on a tense meeting between the president and various Congressional Democrats poised to take over control of the Congress. Democrats expected the president to explore a new path in Iraq:

Instead, Bush began his talk by comparing himself to President Harry S. Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.

Bush said that “in years to come they realized he was right and then his doctrine became the standard for America,” recalled Senate Majority Whip-elect Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “He’s trying to position himself in history and to justify those who continue to stand by him, saying sometimes if you’re right you’re unpopular, and be prepared for criticism.”

Durbin said he challenged Bush’s analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that’s what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now—work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.

Bush, Durbin said, “reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response” and emphasized that he is “the commander in chief.”

This incident strikingly illustrates a pattern seen throughout the president’s tenure. The more the president is challenged, the more his policies are deemed to be failures, the more rigidly he digs in and becomes less open and receptive to change.

The president’s reaction to the 2006 Democratic sweep was also highly illustrative. Virtually all political analysts attributed the election results to the public’s deep dissatisfaction with the Iraq War, yet the president’s response was to order an
escalation
of the war. He did so despite—or perhaps because of—pervasive opposition to such escalation among virtually all Democrats, the overwhelming majority of most Americans, and even substantial numbers in his own party. As opposition to escalation became overwhelming, the president’s reaction was to
dig in further
in order to underscore the certainty of his rightness and to emphasize that his war was a moral imperative and would therefore never be subject to compromise.

BEYOND CONTEMPORARY JUDGMENT

T
hat the president would dismiss the importance of contemporary public opinion in favor of vindication by “history” seemed particularly confounding in light of the president’s prior claims that historical judgment was irrelevant, or at least unknowable. When promoting his second Bush book,
Plan of Attack
, Bob Woodward recounted a December 2003 discussion he had had with the president, by which point it was widely assumed that there were no WMDs in Iraq:

After the second interview with him on Dec. 11, we got up and walked over to one of the doors. There are all of these doors in the Oval Office that lead outside. And he had his hands in his pocket, and I just asked, “Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war,” says Woodward.

And he said, “History,” and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, “History, we won’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

When the president enjoyed soaring personal approval and his policies were overwhelmingly popular, he could not have been more indifferent, even scornful, toward the notion that history’s verdict on him was worthy of consideration. But once Americans turned against both him and his war, the president sought solace in historical judgment to lend support for his chosen course—support that was so plainly lacking among the citizens of the country he led.

The shifting, self-contradictory rationales offered by the president as to
why
he refuses to change course suggest that the justifications for remaining in place do not matter much. When the standard of judgment he uses shifts from affirming his actions to undermining them, he simply seeks out a new, more hospitable standard. The one option he will never consider is that he erred, that his chosen course was wrong. That is because his decisions are rooted in, and dictated by, his faith, and that—by definition—can never be wrong. Thus, anything or anyone that suggests that it is wrong must, for that reason alone, be discarded.

D
uring the height of Bush’s popularity, in 2002 and 2003, there was very little discussion of the role the president’s evangelical beliefs played in his political and foreign policy decisions. In fact, in a nation that had placed itself squarely and loyally behind the president in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there was little questioning about any of the president’s decisions and virtually no scrutiny of his attributes. The political and journalistic elites in the United States, as well as a solid majority of Americans, had placed their faith in George W. Bush, and as usually is the case whenever faith is in play, there was very little skeptical examination of the president or his conduct.

But as the president refused to recognize (or, at least, publicly acknowledge) that severe problems were emerging in Iraq, and as his popularity consequently declined precipitously throughout 2004, far more attention was paid to the extent to which the president’s evangelical certainty precluded him from changing course. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative official in both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, told Ron Suskind in the weeks before the 2004 election:

Just in the past few months 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.

After Bill O’Reilly interviewed the president in October 2006, he observed: “My theory about President Bush is that he is a true believer—he sincerely thinks he is looking out for America in the best ways possible and the polls be damned. That kind of certainty provides solace and calm.”

In his book
The Conservative Soul
, Andrew Sullivan explores the differences between the epistemology embraced by religious fundamentalism and that of non-fundamentalist religious adherents (whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or of any other religion):

The essential claim of the fundamentalist is that he knows the truth. It’s a simple, short phrase, but it would be foolish to underestimate its power in today’s unmoored West and developing world. The fundamentalist doesn’t guess or argue or wonder or question. He doesn’t have to. He
knows.
…The distinction that others make in the modern world—that there is a difference between what we know empirically and what we believe normatively—is one the fundamentalist rejects.

And what the fundamentalist knows is true. It isn’t a proposition, held provisionally, to be tested by further evidence. It isn’t an argument from which he could be dissuaded by something we call reason. It isn’t something that is ever subject to change: what is fundamentally true now, by definition, must be true for all time. For the fundamentalist, there is not a category of things called facts and a separate category called values. The values of the fundamentalist
are
facts….

The president himself has explained that the certainty his faith brings liberates him from doubt and anxiety about the courses of action he pursues. He declared in his 1999 book,
A Charge to Keep:
“My faith frees me…. Frees me to make decisions others might not like. Frees me to do the right thing, even though it will not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next.”

The solace from such certitude is surely of great value to an individual at the spiritual level. As the president himself put it, it frees him to make even the most daunting and (literally) earth-shattering decisions without having to worry about public reaction, worry about whether the decision was the right one, or “worry about what comes next.” Serenity flows and anxiety is eliminated by the conviction that one has found absolute truth.

But when pragmatic concerns are excluded from political and strategic deliberations, then, by definition, decisions become immune from re-examination in light of failed results. Such a mind-set is dangerous in elected officials as such, and especially so when the policy in question is the most monumental of all: war. As Garry Wills wrote in the November 2006 edition of
New York Review of Books
with regard to the evangelical Christians who continue to rank among the president’s most loyal supporters:

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose? That is unthinkable to the evangelicals. They cannot accept the idea of second-guessing God, and he was the one who led them into war. Thus, in 2006, when two thirds of the American people told pollsters that the war in Iraq was a mistake, the third of those still standing behind it were mainly evangelicals (who make up about one third of the population). It was a faith-based certitude.