Building the Better Bush?

Since the election, as I've watched the quadrennial rite of Democratic self-flagellation begin, I find myself returning from time to time to what William Saletan said at Slate.com a day or two after the dust mostly settled (the article's pithy title: 'Why you keep losing to this idiot").

Saletan suggests that the idea of a president governs and leads through the Jed Bartlet-style grasp of policy is an outmoded concept--a quaint, Enlightenment notion whose time ended not long after Presidents stopped wearing powdered wigs. Following this line, maybe the best the Democrats can hope for is to run someone who's likeable as a personality outside the blue states (sorry, Hillary), and who is above all perceived as simple and uncomplicated. Leave "nuance" (i.e., mastering facts, understanding policy) to the people he'd put in place in his administration.

It reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke (are there any new Woody Allen jokes?)--yes, I'm a bigot, but fortunately, I'm a bigot for the left. Better our talking head with good hair in the White House appointing his advisors than their talking head with good hair appointing his advisors. No one pretends this is a vision, but does it even pass muster as a strategy?

I was darkly amused but not terribly surprised to listen to a lot of the post-campaign Conventional Wisdom about Kerry being that he's just . . . well, dull. (And yet, does anyone think that Bush is a terribly interesting man--well, except of course when he's bombing you?) Somewhat the same was the Conventional Wisdom that Kerry spent too much time on boring old policy issues rather than on what excited voters (the latter would, apparently, include homophobia, fundamentalist pandering, and warmongering, but no matter). Am I the only one who remembers that the exact same criticism was leveled at Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign? Remember his reputation as a "policy wonk" (that campaign popularized the term) who gave long-winded, boring speeches? Who actually loved to sit around and talk about the implications of this particular section of federal code on that particular sector of the economy? Even in a campaign against Bush the Elder, who famously admitted he didn't have much to contribute on "the vision thing," the idea that the president should himself be interested in--let alone understand--how policies work was already considered, by the purveyors of Conventional Wisdom, a faint embarrassment.

And we can take the idea back farther: The real division of image and competence took off under Ronald Reagan. What accounts for Iran-Contra except a president who blithely--proudly--ignored the law, and encouraged and assisted his administration to do the same, because of what he felt was right "in his heart?" Recall that when Reagan finally got pinned down on that whole ugly business, he admitted in the end that it really did "appear" to have been a straight arms-for-hostages deal. But, he insisted, that had not been what he believed; "in my heart," he assured us, he didn't think it was. And America excused.

The only upside of this I can think of is that it laid the groundwork for Clinton to escape impeachment a decade later. In the latter case as in the former, America looked at a man that most people figured had really "done it," but because the economy was good and they liked the man's attackers less than the man himself, they looked the other way.

Back to Saletan: His position is that the Democrats need to build a better Bush--a Bush for the left. He urges the Dems to find someone who would be perceived as just as uncomplicated as Bush (less charitable observers would say "just as hollow"), but whose memes are about the Dems as "the party of responsibility" . . . "the party that rewards ordinary people who do what they're supposed to do—and protects them from those who don't." (Saletan thought it's John Edwards. Good luck.)

Keep that man visible for the next four years, says Saletan, put him through charm school, clear away his main presidential competitors for '08 (sorry again, Hillary), and then run what, in this election, has come to be called a "values" campaign, since that's what the red-state people seem to want. After winning, he can appoint technocrats (Richelieus? Cheneys?) to handle the tedious business of actually running things while the president, as the front man, reassures the country with his "values"--with his "heart," or his "gut," or whatever part of the viscera is politically fashionable by then. (Who knows--maybe even the penis will be exonerated and politically rehabilitated again by then. Peggy Noonan made a pretty good start at it after Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in full flight harness. Anything except the brain, of course. Anything but that.) This Democratic Galatea's implicit promise, like Bush's, would not be "I know what I'm doing," but rather "You can trust my instincts."

Note that even as Bush's State of the Union nears, we still have no idea--neither does Bush, I imagine--of how he can possibly do all the things he proposes (social security privatization, keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, expanding the war on terror, locking in the tax cuts). How can he hope to pay for it? No idea. Doesn't matter. He has a mandate now. He has political capital, and it's his nature, he reminded us, to spend it when he's got it. Trusting his instincts--horrifying image.

Little about Saletan's idea is attractive to me--I'm never going to go quietly on the subject of dumbing down the presidency. But the more fundamental question for the left remains, doesn't it?