In May 2004, colleague and co-conspirator Gary joined me on a bicycle tour of western Ireland. On the first night, our little tour group stayed on the Aran Islands and had dinner at a lovely inn. We drank Guinness by the fire in the front room as we waited for them to prepare our table, and our journal picks it up from there:
A copy of the Sunday Irish Times was open, and I picked it up and saw an article about Bush’s upcoming visit to Ireland. ("Why is he coming to Ireland?" someone around the fire asked. "Because some other country drew the long straw," I answered.) The article was pretty funny--a few paragraphs about the anti-Bush protests planned, and so on, then a paragraph about how much everyone here loved Bill Clinton when he visited, then a few more paragraphs about protesting Bush, then another paragraph about that nice Mr. Clinton . . .
Bush meets a real interviewer
As a tee-up to the tour, Bush gave a White House interview with RTE's veteran Washington correspondent Carole Coleman. Did the interview itself go well? Uhm . . . not so much. Doesn't even depend on your point of view, really--Coleman and Bush would probably both agree on that.
Ah, but if you asked them why it didn't . . . well, that's where opinions vary.
Unfortunately, it appears that Coleman failed to receive the memo informing reporters that they are supposed to treat this president with kid gloves. Instead, she confronted him as any serious journalist would a world leader.
She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless "answers" that satisfy the White House press corps - at one point, he mumbled, "My job is to do my job" - she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.
The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman's questions and follow-ups - "Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?" the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.
But don't take John Nichols' word for it; you can see a streaming version of the interview here. It's 11 minutes well spent. Trust me.
[Update July 2008: The video is now available on YouTube:]
I remember thinking at the time: Lord willing, maybe we can still coast a little while longer on the good will we built up from letting in the Potato Famine refugees, and from John Kennedy and Tip O'Neill, plus all those U2 albums we bought. Maybe the Irish are still fond of Americans at large, in other words, but the people from the land of Swift, Wilde, and Joyce have got to think our president is a dangerous, molly-coddled nitwit.
Conversational implicature
Part of the reason her questions were an interruption to him was that there was no logical "shape" to his answers. No recognizable narrative or syllogistic form. No Strunk & White paragraph structure. No beginning/middle/end. They barely qualified as stream of consciousness--more like trickle of consciousness. They didn't so much arrive at a definite point as simply wander on for a while and then just quit. An interviewer could surely be forgiven if she couldn’t tell whether a particular sentence was the end of his thought.
It's as if he had a shoebox full of focus-group tested sentences, a single sentence with no context on each little slip of paper, and every time she'd ask a question he'd throw them up in the air and just pick them up one at a time and read them. And the interviewer simply didn't understand that she wasn't allowed to ask a new question as long as there were still slips of paper on the floor.
As a test--if you really feel like it, and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't--take one of his answers and randomly re-order the sentences. See if he makes any less real sense (or if it's any harder to tell when any given answer is winding up).
Living well is the best revenge, next to publishing one's memoirs
Coleman's account of her time as a correspondent in America hits the stand this month, and an excerpt from the chapter recounting her Close Encounter of the Bush Kind is featured prominently in the Sunday Times. It's got the kind of headline that sets off European journalism from its staid American counterpart.
[Update, July 2008: Looks like that article is no longer available at the Times (UK) site. Steve Gilliard also saved another long excerpt at the time. The title I referred to was "I Could Have Slapped Him." Now, of course, we know that this would have earned Coleman the distinction of being the first Irish journalist to be imprisoned in Gitmo.]
Coleman's interview got off to a start that would, I think, make most people's flesh crawl:
"Thanks for comin', Mr President" I said, sticking out my hand. I had borrowed this greeting directly from him. When Bush made a speech at a rally or town hall, he always began by saying "Thanks for comin'" in his man-of-the-people manner. If he detected the humour in my greeting, he didn't let on. He took my hand with a firm grip and, bringing his face right up close to mine, stared me straight in the eyes for several seconds, as though drinking in every detail of my face. He sat down and an aide attached a microphone to his jacket.
Nobody said a word. "We don't address the president unless he speaks first," a member of the film crew had told me earlier. The resulting silence seemed odd and discomforting, so I broke it. "How has your day been, Mr President?" Without looking up at me, he continued to straighten his tie and replied in a strong Texan drawl, "Very busy."
This was followed by an even more disconcerting silence that, compounded by the six feet separating us, made it difficult to establish any rapport.
The rest of the excerpt is a fascinating--if creepy--account of Coleman trying to get into Bush's head, with mixed success.
You can read the rest: Handlers counting the number of times she interrupted Bush. Horrified staffers trying to flag Bush down when he began going off-message to defend his Palestine policy. Subsequent White House retaliation for her lack of deference.
The punch line comes not from Coleman herself, but from Michael Moore (ironically, he was one of the handful of banned topics in the interview):
Moore did notice RTE's interview with the president and in the weeks that followed urged American journalists to follow the example of "that Irish woman".
"In the end, doesn't it always take the Irish to speak up?" he said. "She's my hero. Where are the Carole Colemans in the US press?"
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