George Bush’s problem has been that he keeps doing more of precisely what got him in trouble with so many voters in the first place. His idea of fighting back has a shrill, frantic, unreassuring personal edge to it. It diminishes him every time. You can’t carry on like that and, at the same time, be saying: Hey, I’m the president with all the majesty and awe that inspires. It’s one or the other.
It is said that the reason Bush has to go in for so much shin-kicking is that he is in a program bind, there being great division within his administration and his party on the proper economic course and on social issues as well, not to mention the difficulty of arguing for change when you’re what has to be changed. All true-and yet I think there are a handful of more basic, more important considerations that take priority in the voters’ minds. They are the gut criteria against which every candidate for president is judged, consciously and unconsciously: (1) willingness to accept responsibility, (2) evidence of a genuine public purpose and (3) strength. These are the presidential big three. Everything else comes after.
The first, willingness to accept responsibility, is pretty much the definition of the job, not just a description of a qualification for it. That is why, I think, we get so particularly angry about flip-flopping and ducking and outright lying in our presidential candidates, more so than, say, when Senator Claghorn or County Commissioner Shakedown is running for re-election. The rage over some of Bill Clinton’s more artful dodges last spring was surely due to this. We want a president to take full responsibility for his acts. Outright lying, which goes beyond the merely artful, stands on its own as vice. But when it is employed by a president or a presidential aspirant to evade responsibility for something he has said or done, I believe it is less the fact of deliberately speaking an untruth than the fact of refusing thereby to take responsibility that is regarded as disqualifying.
To me, throughout his pre-withdrawal campaign, this was Ross Perot’s biggest failing. Some people accused him of habitually lying and laid out their case in the press. What the untruths they cited always seemed to be about was Perot’s having done something that either hadn’t turned out well, didn’t look very good now or didn’t fit with the argument of the day. He denied it had ever happened. These statements came across to me not so much as lies as pure flight. Finally, after he announced he wouldn’t run, he just sort of shucked responsibility for anything, no matter how inconsequential in the great scheme of things, that hadn’t worked out well. We were asked to believe he hadn’t even been responsible for hiring campaign co-chairman Ed Rollins–someone or other had told him to, or something. Ducking like this is the worst attribute a presidential candidate can have on his resume.
Clinton, last spring, got pasted so hard for moving away from difficult or troublesome stands that he seemed to get more resolute, even seeking to make a conspicuous political virtue of espousing unpopular causes before particular audiences. Bush, who has ideologically moved all over the place, has particular trouble on the responsibility issue. This is true even though in the gulf war he self-evidently accepted an enormous burden of responsibility, and despite his record of personal bravery in the war. It is one of the inexplicable paradoxes of the man. For politically he is compulsively given to blaming others when he comes up short. In addition, more than others, Bush tends to have his subordinates say the nasty things and take the heat, even as he pretends never to have heard of the opponent who is clearly on his mind and whose name he refuses to mention. It looks like hiding.
If Perot wholeheartedly espouses the hairshirt report his campaign thinkers drew up for him, he might blur this issue of fleeing responsibility. But until now he has had a purpose problem. He never demonstrated that he was driven by an identifiable public, as distinct from egotistic, purpose. All good pols must have healthy egos. But without a credible public purpose that is healthier and larger than that ego and not simply at its service, it is no go.
This is the “vision thing” problem for Bush, the lack of passion and priority so often cited by the disaffected. Bush is seen as having the defect Ted Kennedy revealed when, in that fateful interview a few years back, he was left nonplused by the threshold question of why he wanted to be president. The implication of his lack of an answer was that he should be president, was entitled to it and had, frankly, never wondered why in any public-policy terms. Bush can’t seem to answer the question convincingly, either.
Finally there is strength, which is not to be mixed up with belligerence, meanness or swagger. Following a purpose, taking the heat for it, making it come about-these are the evidences of strength. Clinton has been purposeful and dogged, close but not quite yet definably it: we will see in the months ahead if he is strong. I think that’s what people are watching for and still weighing. Maybe Perot will show strength in championing a risky, uningratiating economic cause. We’ll see.
Bush has to stop blaming and complaining. He has to contain pettiness and panic, show himself to be in control of events, not in the control of others or at the mercy of tiny emotions. If there is a way to make his rescue by Jim Baker, should that occur, seem strong, I haven’t thought of it. But the White House crowd and their assorted Republican associates are neither dumb nor resourceless, though they may have seemed that way lately. What they have to deal with is an overarching economic issue; but it is an economic issue wrapped in a character issue, and their first imperative is creating a credible candidate to carry forward whatever plan they finally come up with.
