- Pocono Summit, PA. It was here, in the parking lot of
Cramer's building supply, only 15 miles from a Nascar racetrack, in a pivotal
battleground state, on the back of a battered work van, that we saw the
first one. "Somewhere in Texas," the bumper sticker said, "a
village is missing its idiot." The next Bush-is-thick sticker showed
up at Home Depot on the back of an equally battered pick-up driven by a
tough-looking kid dressed for construction work. It said:
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- BUSH
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- LIKE A ROCK
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- ONLY DUMBER
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- These are signs of the fierce conviction of some voters
- and the secret fear of a quieter and perhaps larger group - that George
Bush is not smart enough to continue as president. Indeed, if an unscientific
survey of bumper stickers, graffiti and letters to the editor in this conservative
mountain region of eastern Pennsylvania is an indicator, doubts are spreading,
and probably not in a way helpful to the Republicans.
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- Yet the subject is seldom taken head on by the mainstream
newspapers and network news. The discourse about presidential intelligence
appears mainly on the internet, in the partisan press, among television
comics and at the level of backyard jokes and arguments. The White House
has shown a devious brilliance in keeping a contrived debate on John Kerry's
"fitness" to be commander-in-chief in the headlines, at the expense
of any prolonged journalistic examination of the far more important question
of Bush's mental capacity. That uncomfortable question will surely be glossed
over when the Republican national convention starts next week in New York.
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- After four decades of newspapering, including coverage
of the "dumb" Ronald Reagan and the "smart" Jimmy Carter
in 1976 and 1980, I am not unsympathetic to the problems of reporters and
editors trying to inform the public on this touchiest of competency issues.
As Richard Reeves commented memorably in a 1976 article comparing Gerald
Ford to Bozo the Clown, the rules of conventional journalism make it almost
impossible to report that a presidential candidate "had nothing to
say and said it badly to a stunned crowd". Big news organisations
are captives of our own rules of fairness. Voters are doubly disadvantaged
- by a paucity of information in the campaign coverage and by the elusive
nature of the evidence about the kinds of intelligence that matter in our
leaders.
-
- For example, my generation of White House correspondents
was accused of covering up Ronald Reagan's supposed stupidity and his reliance
on fictional "facts" derived from Errol Flynn movies and the
John Birch Society, the rightwing organisation founded in 1958 to combat
the perceived infiltration of communism. In 1981, Clark Clifford, the Democratic
"wise man", entertained Georgetown dinner parties with the killer
line that Reagan was "an amiable dunce". Twenty years later,
we know that Clifford got indicted for bank fraud and the dunce ended the
cold war and the entire Soviet era.
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- This lesson of history raises questions of seeming importance.
What is presidential intelligence, and how much does it really matter?
Most astute Americans can recite the lists of ostentatiously brilliant
presidents who faltered (Wilson, Hoover, etc) and apparent plodders who
triumphed (Truman). When I was covering the Reagan White House in 1981,
all his top aides were wholesaling Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous comment
about FDR possessing "a second-rate intellect and a first-rate temperament".
In the end, Reagan confounded scholars, journalists and voters alike. Even
so devoted a cheerleader as Peggy Noonan, a Reagan speechwriter, sees him
as flawed by "detachment". His diligent and tormented biographer,
Edmund Morris, does not even list "intelligence" as an index
entry under Reagan, Ronald Wilson. Such entries are also missing from such
solid journalistic biographies as those by Lou Cannon and Lawrence Barrett.
Morris, in his obituary essay about Reagan in the New Yorker, referred
in one paragraph to his instinctive "intelligence" and in the
next to his "ignorance".
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- To be fair, innate intelligence has to do with capability
and ignorance to do with variables such as educational opportunity and
personal diligence. But the conundrum remains. Is intellect important in
presidents? If Americans can't solve the question definitively in the matter
of John Kerry and George Bush, we damn sure ought to make an educated guess.
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- One highly imperfect but salient way to do so is at the
level of campaign tactics. Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has
a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure their SATs and college transcripts would
put Kerry far ahead. Yet at this point in the campaign, Bush deserves an
A or a high B instead of a gentleman's C when it comes to neutralising
Kerry's knowledge advantage. That much was apparent even before the campaign
got mired in the current argument over the nasty television commercials
questioning Kerry's record of heroism as a Swift Boat commander in Vietnam.
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- Over the course of the summer Bush, or more likely his
political adviser, Karl Rove, dictated the subject-matter of the campaign
by successfully triggering Kerry's taste for complicated ideas and explanations.
Kerry is telling voters that we live in a complex world. Americans know
that, but as an electorate, they are not drawn to complexity. Kerry's explanations
about his conflicting votes on the Iraq war and how he would have conducted
it are wondrous as rhetorical architecture. They are also signs that Bush
has trapped him into having the wrong conversation with the voters. Last
week, Bush trumped Kerry's intricate explanation of his conflicting votes
on funding the Iraq war by going on Larry King Live and saying over and
over that a president must be resolute, and that he will be. Meanwhile,
his wife Laura seemed to make a sale with the outrageous claim that her
husband's restrictions on stem cells are not really hurting medical research.
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- Whatever his IQ, George Bush as a candidate is a one-trick
pony. The story of the campaign so far is that Kerry is letting him get
by with his single trick - endless repetitions of "I make a decision;
I stick to it; that's what presidents do." As astute an observer as
David Broder has written that Bush's twin millstones - the war and a job-losing
economy - may bring about his defeat. I'm not so sure, mainly because Kerry
and his running mate, John Edwards, keep talking about what the White House
wants them to talk about instead of messages that the bumper-sticker guys
at Cramer's and Home Depot need to repeat to their buddies. They have yet
to force Bush outside his one-trick comfort zone.
-
- That pattern continued this week as Rove demonstrated
his mastery of the "Willie Horton strategy" perfected by his
mentor, the late Lee Atwater. In 1988, Atwater famously destroyed the campaign
of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, with
a series of "independent" ads claiming that Dukakis had improperly
paroled a convicted rapist and murderer named Willie Horton. This year,
wealthy Bush supporters close to Rove have funded a front organisation
called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to carry out an "independent"
attack on Kerry's well-documented record as a decorated battle commander
in Vietnam.
-
- Kerry's demand that Bush condemn the commercial and Bush's
hair-splitting refusal to do so dominated the news all week. Bush refers
to Kerry's Vietnam service as "noble" while carefully avoiding
a specific, direct denunciation of the veterans' grossly misleading ad.
There's a good reason for this. The president does not want to identify
with these worms who sponsored the ads, but he wants their commercials
to keep eating away at the apple of Kerry's much stronger reputation as
a warrior.
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- Happily for the White House, this contrived debate over
Kerry's war record diverts voters from a truly important national-security
question related to the intellectual capability of the incumbent. Was George
W dumb enough to be talked into adopting a flawed strategy for a phoney
war by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney? The facts and authorship of these
blunders are beyond dispute. Cheney and neo-conservative theorists wanted
to make war on Iraq, not al-Qaida. Rumsfeld wanted to do it with a much
smaller force than the military needed. What we don't know is why Bush
went along.
-
- Bush's former press secretary, Karen Hughes, in her awkwardly
named book Ten Minutes from Normal, assures us that what "Bush does
best of all" is "ask questions that bore to the heart of the
matter". She says that during the 2000 campaign, she and a "brilliant"
issues staff "never once succeeded" in anticipating all of Bush's
penetrating questions. "He has a laserlike ability," Hughes writes,
"to reduce an issue to its core."
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- In regard to Iraq and the war on terror, there's little
evidence of such Bush interventions in the public record or the report
of the 9/11 Commission. We have been told instead that the then director
of central intelligence, George Tenet, misled Bush by assuring him that
Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a
slam dunk".
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- The millions of us who did not witness this and other
potentially laserlike interactions must rely on speculation as to how Bush's
mind works. The most informative writing I've seen on that score was an
essay published over a year ago in the Atlantic Monthly by Richard Brookhiser,
the historian and conservative columnist sympathetic to Bush. "Bush
has intelligence, energy and humility," he writes, "but does
he have imagination?"
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- Brookhiser goes on to worry that Bush's limited information
"habitat" could cut him off from the ideas necessary to feed
presidential creativity in activities like running a major war. ("Habitat"
is a wonderfully chosen word in that it invokes the territoriality of White
House advisers in general. Can we imagine Rumsfeld, the alpha-male advocate
of hi-tech warfare, inviting the commander of an armoured division into
the cabinet room to tell the president why it's stupid not to take more
tanks to Iraq?)
-
- Brookhiser goes on to speak of Bush's reliance on "instinct"
and the fact that Bush's religious "faith means that he does not tolerate,
or even recognise, ambiguity". The comments sent my memory reeling
back to the Reagan campaigns and what the cartoonist Garry Trudeau called
"the search for Reagan's brain". Trudeau's meaning, of course,
was that Reagan didn't have one, but these days the phrase is to me more
evocative of the journalistic gropings of the White House press corps to
explain what, if anything, was going on inside that big, smiling, glossy-haired
head. In a filing cabinet I had not opened in over 20 years, I found my
own attempt - a 6,000-word draft of "reflections" on "Reagan's
mind". I had never turned the piece in to my editors at the New York
Times because I felt I had not solved the mystery as to the quality of
Reagan's intellect.
-
- I was not the first, nor will I be the last writer to
break his pick on that stone. But in reviewing what I wrote in 1982 after
two years of close observation of Reagan on the campaign trail and in the
White House, I saw a couple of points that seemed worth revisiting as Reagan's
self-appointed heir seeks a second term. I characterised Reagan as a "political
primitive" who valued "beliefs over knowledge" based on
verifiable facts. The White House spin was that this was a positive in
that it represented "rawbone American thinking". I also noted
that Reagan had a "high tolerance for ambiguity" as to the outcome
of policies that proceeded from such rough-hewn thought.
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- That strikes me as a different - less troubling - trait
than what Brookhiser sees as Bush's refusal to recognise the mere existence
of ambiguity. In general, I've come to feel that what we have in George
Bush is a shadowy version of Reagan's strengths and an exaggerated version
of his intellectual weaknesses.
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- In 1982, at the height of my journalistic desire to explain
Reagan's brain, I went to see David Gergen, then a presidential assistant
in charge of communications. His was not an easy job, since it included
such tasks as explaining Reagan's decision to throw thousands of the most
disabled Americans off social security assistance. We're not talking "welfare
queens" here. We're talking blind people in wheelchairs.
-
- I told Gergen I wanted to write a piece for the sophisticated
reader about exactly how Reagan's mind worked. With a twinkle in his eye,
Gergen said, "It will be a long, long time before we can have that
conversation."
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- It hardly seems worth the trouble now. Reagan is in the
pantheon, and the American nation and its allies and adversaries escaped
mutual assured destruction. Now the US is at war in Iraq in a conflict
that could yet metastasise into regional strife or global terrorism. We'll
never know how much Reagan thought and how much he gambled in regard to
security and economics. My guess is the answer would be pretty scary. So
for the 150,000 US troops in Iraq, for the 99% of taxpayers who will not
get a five-figure windfall, for the millions of urbanites unsettled by
talk of suitcase nukes, it's still worth asking how Bush's mind really
works.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/
story/0,14259,1291916,00.html
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