Authors: Richard Ben Cramer
What It Takes (189 page)
But alas, in his last eighteen months, when confronted by problems of systemic failure, or collective unfairness—the slump in the U.S. economy, the riots in Los Angeles—Bush had only the same personal coin with which to pay his way. Suddenly, he seemed every bit as clueless as his political opponents contended.
He couldn’t snap a pic on the Lincoln bed for everyone from South Central L.A. He couldn’t send Christmas cards to nine million unemployed. He couldn’t make sense of his refusal to gear up the government to help. He couldn’t even make stick his claim that he was hamstrung: Wasn’t he the Caesar of the Gulf?
The obvious conclusion was that Bush didn’t
get it
—and that, to his eternal regret, was the claim that stuck. His gee-whiz at the supermarket scanner was just the start of a sorry mudslide. He claimed (for a year!), to a chorus of public jeers, that there was no recession. When at last he admitted there was a recession, he insisted at the same time that we were pulling out of it. When some friend finally beat into his skull that woe was upon the land and persistent, Bush burst out of the White House to affirm that neither he nor the U.S. would be beaten down. But the line that he double-thought out of his mouth was: “Don’t cry for me, Argentina!”
Other friends adjured him to
show
he felt the pain of the common man. But by that time Bush was reduced (like old Dutch Reagan before him) to reading from “talking points” that someone stuck in his hand. These notes were supposed to shock-start some long-stunned synapse in his brain. Bush instead read them word for word. “Message: I care.”
The cruel joke was, of course, he did care—enough to spend half his life trying to do something great for the Republic. In November ’92, when four out of five Americans told pollsters their President “didn’t care” about people like them, George Bush was, at that moment, proposing to give up his last, most active years on the planet to
prove
he could be the President who made them glad of their vote.
In the end, we lost all sight of that avid George Bush, who’d spend himself so personally (and so promiscuously) to the point of exhaustion. We only saw the exhaustion. Despite (maybe because of) the millions of words, thousands of soundbites, that issue from the West Wing over the course of four years, the guy inside the suit behind the desk in the Oval Office disappears altogether. The White House is the thickest and shiniest bubble of all.
It’s not just that we can’t see him. From the White House, he can’t see anything outside.
Why didn’t Bush get it?
Well, the White House was running like a top! Everyone who walked into
his
office had a
wonderful
job—and all were excited by the swell things they were doing for the country and its people. Every microphone over which he peered had a thousand faces upturned to his, ready to cheer his every applause line. If he left Washington, every tarmac on which
Air Force One
touched down had a line of prosperous people in suits, to pump Bush’s hand and tell him things were, we were, he was ...
great
!
By that time, Bush had lived in the bubble for fifteen years straight. By that time, it was apparent, he couldn’t see us at all. It’s an easy slide to the notion that he must not have tried to see out.
Presidents do try. Compare the portraits of Presidents-elect—those powerful men in their prime—to the gray, aged figures who wave good-bye from the helicopter steps on the South Lawn ... we can all see the toll of trying.
Bill Clinton, with his lively understanding of what brought him to the Oval Office, has been vowing several times a week that he will not be swallowed, and will not go blind in the fog. Still, it was two days into his term when
The New York Times
noted “much talk about how Mr. Clinton, once so attuned to his middle-class constituency, seemed to have lost touch with popular opinion.” The new President is fighting back. As I write, he’s recovering from his latest bus trip, this to thump the tub for his tax plan.
And old George Bush is just back from a trip, too—one that seemed curiously suited to redress his ills in office ... after the vote!
George and Bar had a week on a cruise ship—Carnival, Princess, one of those: you know, the shining mystery that is Puerto Rico ... and a cha-cha contest for Seniors in the disco after dinner (All You Can Eat!).
If, alas, a President can bring to his job no more than the lessons of his own life ... the same is true for an ex-President. In this case, characteristically, the lesson came from Prescott Bush, who was riding the train with his young son George one day more than fifty years ago. “See that man?” said Big Pres, nudging George in the parlor car. “He was the Governor of Connecticut!
“And here he is, riding the train, with the people—just like us.”
—Richard Ben Cramer
February 1993
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Portions of this work were originally published in
Esquire
magazine.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Williamson Music for permission to reprint six lines from “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright 1945 by Williamson Music. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Williamson Music.
copyright © 1992, 1993 by Richard Ben Cramer
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-1964-5
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