The Arizona Debate: Bush Brought to Book
Tonight's Republican debate in Phoenix, Ariz., was much, much better than
the one that took place last week in New Hampshire. That debate, sponsored by
Fox News and WMUR television in Manchester, was all inside baseball. The
questioners, Brit Hume and Karen Brown, asked McCain about his temper, Bush
about whether he knew how to read, and Keyes about his eccentric view that he
is the victim of media racism. This one, sponsored by CNN, featured far more
useful questions about actual issues in the campaign. Correspondents Judy
Woodruff, John King and Candy Crowley asked intelligently about education,
economics, and foreign policy. The more varied format, which also allowed the
candidates to question each other, was a marked improvement as well.
Once again, all eyes were on the front-runner. George W. Bush's second
performance was consistent with his first. He came across as jaunty, likable,
and brimming with self-confidence. He did not blunder by confusing the Balkans
with the Baltics, referring to the ruler of Korea as "Kim somebody," or
identifying the EITC as a baseball statistic. But if Bush didn't blow it, he
also failed to reveal any hidden depths. In the round of questions on foreign
policy, Judy Woodruff asked him my dream question, which was what he learned
from that book about Dean Acheson he mentioned he was reading. To be precise,
Woodruff asked what lessons Bush took from the successes and failures of
Acheson and George Marshall.
Still failing to identify the book (which must be the recent Acheson
biography by James Chace), Bush said--and this is a verbatim transcription,
checked against my tape--"The lessons learned are is that the United States
must not retreat within our borders. That we must promote the peace. In order
promote the peace we've got to have strong alliances--alliances in Europe,
alliances in the Far East. In order promote the peace, I believe we ought to be
a free-trading nation. ... The lessons of Acheson and Marshall are is that our
nation's greatest export to the world has been, is, and always will be the
incredible freedoms we understand in the great land called America."
One lesson Bush obviously did not learn from Dean Acheson is how to form a
grammatical sentence. Maybe he does better in Spanish, but the man can barely
speak English. W.'s most common difficultly, as in the above passage, is with
noun-verb agreement. When he gets even slightly worked up, he can't arbitrate
between his seeming need for a plural verb and his seeming need for a singular
one. So he uses both, as in his favored expression "are is." Bush also commonly
removes the "to" from infinitives, as with "in order promote the peace." Syntax
is not his friend.
The way he speaks reminds me of something I once read about the linguist
Myrna Gopnik and her work on what I believe she calls "Family K." Although
otherwise normally intelligent, members of Family K stumble over basic grammar,
coming up with sentences like, "The boys eat four cookie." They have trouble
creating the plurals of words and forming verbs in the past tense--things most
4-year-olds can easily manage. I can't remember what Gopnik calls this rare and
peculiar form of aphasia, but W. and his father both seem to suffer from a
version of it. Another possibility: The Bushes actually are "Family
K."
The second, and probably more significant criticism of Bush's answer is that
his comments on whatever Acheson book he is reading couldn't have been more
trite and banal. They are, in fact, simply Bush's own platitudes about the
present attached to a book he claims to be reading. Marshall and Acheson didn't
believe that communism could be contained, or the peace kept, by a policy of
"free-trading." They argued for line-drawing and military confrontation--a
point John McCain made it clear he understood in a glancing reference to
Acheson and Korea in his own answer to a foreign policy quesiton. Bush
displayed this same callowness throughout the evening. In other instances, such
as in his closing remarks, he simply recited familiar arias from his stump
speech.
The other candidate whose performance deserves comment is Steve Forbes. What
I noticed about Forbes' performance tonight was that it was exactly the same as
every other Forbes performance--thoroughly dishonest, numbingly repetitive, and
increasingly obnoxious in its gratuitous and ineffectual anti-Washington
demagoguery. In only his second campaign, Forbes has turned into a full-fledged
Harold Stassen figure--a candidate for whom unpopularity serves as some kind of
weird inspiration. The more you wish that Forbes would go away, the more it
provokes him to stay and waste more of your time. And with his money, he can
waste a lot of your time.
Some assume that because Forbes looks like a dork, he must have some
substance buried somewhere. Though he sounds even more canned than Bush, many
people think of him as intellectually if not morally superior for canning the
answers himself, instead of being sleep-taught by a team of former deputy
undersecretaries. In fact, I think Forbes is far less of his own man than Bush,
and too much of a weathervane to qualify even as a genuine ideologue. Bush,
fairly new to politics, is still discovering his principles. Forbes is already
abandoning his second set. Where Bush has an idea of where he wants to lead the
Republican Party (to the center), Forbes thinks that if he figures out where
the party is going, he can simply hop aboard and ride it.
It's this futile whoring after primary votes that has made Forbes such a
pathetic figure. After his 1996 debacle, Forbes swapped his libertarian-tinged,
purely economic conservatism for its opposite--a preachy, self-righteous social
conservatism. He pandered to what he took to be the ascendant religious right
by saying that abortion was the most important issue to him. Amazingly enough,
many moral conservatives accepted his conversion. But their support hasn't
helped Forbes--in fact, it has made him more unelectable than ever. So without
so much as a blink of the eye, Forbes has reversed course once again. In the
recent debates, he has left abortion and school prayer to the true believers
Keyes and Bauer, and focused exclusively on the flat tax, repeating the phrase
as a kind of meditational "om." Only this time, his fanaticism doesn't even
sound sincere.
